Lilla Cabot Perry: An Introduction

"Reading" by Lilla Cabot Perry

"Lilla Cabot Perry was born in Boston on January 13, 1848. She was the oldest of eight children in the family of the distinguished surgeon Dr. Samuel Cabot and his wife, Anna Lowell Jackson Cabot. Simple living, 'high thinking' and service to others - such were the principles that the Cabots taught their children at an early age. Books and sports were favorite pastimes pursued outside of school hours. Perry's childhood memories also included the host of literary giants who poured into the family's front parlor on Park Square. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Louisa May Alcott played 'fox and geese' with the Cabot children, for example, and James Russell Lowell was an intimate member of the family circle.

Lilla was thirteen years of age when the first shots at Fort Sumter were fired, which announced a turning point in American history. Ardent abolitionists, both Samuel and Hannah Cabot took an active part in the Civil War, assisting the ill and wounded and offering refuge to runaway slaves. Caring for those in need was a Cabot commitment which Lilla exhibited all her life.

The war ended when Lilla was seventeen. That same year her father purchased a farm called Cherry Hill in nearby Canton, Massachusetts, where, as she later remembered, the family 'lived very close to the beauties of nature... From our house on top of the hill, the countryside spread out all around like the large patchwork quilt on my grandmother's bed. Already I had a longing to paint.'

Perry was an exceptional student, however, and there were other calls as well as art - literature and languages, poetry and music - which she pursued with a passion far extending the classroom walls. Beethoven brought tears, as did certain lines from Keats or Shelley. For Lilla and her very select friends, who included Helen Bell and Henry James, the metropolis provided a stimulating and congenial atmosphere."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Lilla Cabot Perry: An American Impressionist" by Meredith Martindale.)