Lilla Cabot Perry Massachusetts (1848 - 1933) PORTRAIT OF A JAPANESE MAN oil on canvas, unframed signed, dated & inscribed: lower left, L.C. Perry, Tokyo 1901 H31 3/4" W29 3/4" *Provenance: Was purchased from the estate of the artist. *Artist biography: Born in Boston, Lilla Perry was a key person, along with Mary Cassatt, in bringing French Impressionism to the United States from France. She was also the artist most closely involved with the Guild of Boston Artists, which opened its galleries in 1914 to promote accomplished painters and sculptors. She served on the board as the first secretary and worked hard to cultivate persons for financial backing. She had prominent Boston social credentials that included the Cabot and Lowell families. Her father was a distinguished surgeon, and her husband's great uncle, Commodore Matthew Perry, opened Japan to the world in 1853. In 1874, she married Professor Thomas Sergeant Perry, a teacher of 18th-century literature, and their home became a gathering place for many Boston intellectuals including Henry James, William Dean Howells, and her brother-in-law, painter John LaFarge. She had elite private schooling and began her art studies with Robert Vonnoh and Dennis Bunker at the Cowles School in Boston, and then studied in France privately with Alfred Stevens and at the Julian and Colarossi Academies. She also exhibited at the salons and expositions. In 1889, Perry and Cecilia Beaux visited Claude Monet at Giverny, and she was highly intrigued with his painting. He encouraged her to put down on canvas her first impression, saying that was the truest and most pure expression. Between 1889 and 1907, she and her husband spent ten summer seasons in Giverny, where they lived next door to Monet and became close friends. Perry recorded interviews with Monet, who seemed very fond of her. She also successfully encouraged her wealthy friends to purchase Monet's paintings. In 1889, she returned to Boston with one of Monet's paintings, Etretat, one of the first Impressionist works to appear in that area, and she was surprised that no one was very taken with the painting. Several years later, she gave lectures on Monet to the Boston Art Students Association. In 1898, her husband accepted a college teaching position in Tokyo, Japan as chair of English Literature, and living there until 1901, she painted the landscape and the people, completing more than eighty paintings. Of this period in her life, art historian William Gerdts wrote: "Lilla Perry was one of the most significant of the American painters who went to Japan in the late 19th century; . . . of all the Americans to work there, Perry's work is the least traditional and is the most indebted to the Impressionist Aesthetic, and some of her Japanese scenes are, in color and brushwork, extremely close to Monet." (American Impressionism, 97) In her later years, she lived in the upper class Back Bay area of Boston and spent her summers in Hancock, New Hampshire. She was a founder and first Secretary of the guild of Boston Artists. Much of her painting of that period was for her own enjoyment and focused on activities of upper class women, with her daughters frequently serving as the models. She seldom did any preliminary sketching, and pastel was a favorite medium.