(b Boston, MA, 13 Jan 1848; d Hancock, NH, 1933). American painter and writer. She belonged to the East Coast upper middle class, and her paintings reflect her social position and era. She was ahead of her time, however, in admiring and advocating the French Impressionist painters. In 1874 she married Professor Thomas Sargeant Perry, a specialist in 18th-century English literature. Their home became a meeting place for intellectuals. She studied during the 1880s at Cowles School in Boston and later at the Académie Julian and Académie Colarossi in Paris with Alfred Stevens. In 1889 she met Claude Monet, who became a friend and mentor. During the summers of ten years she was a neighbour to Monet in Giverny, coming to know both him and Camille Pissarro well. (Her house was bought in 1987 by American collector Daniel J. Terra to be made into the Musée Américain, to house works primarily by American Impressionists; a new building was, however, opened for this purpose eventually.) Her style of painting reflects their common interest in the depiction of light, the materiality of paint and the dissolution of form. The paintings themselves, however, were not as radical as theirs and showed more attention to detail (e.g. The Trio (Alice, Edith and Margaret Perry), c. 1898–1900; Cambridge, MA, Fogg). From 1893 she spent eight years in Tokyo, where her husband had taken up a teaching post, and made many paintings of Japanese life and scenery, using the technique she had developed in France. She was an amateur artist but enjoyed a good critical reputation in her time, exhibiting in Boston and New York, as well as in Europe. Perry also wrote poetry, of which she published four volumes between 1886 and 1923.

• Perry, Lila Cabot
  • Monet, Claude, §2: Working methods and technique