Lilla Cabot Perry: Difficult Years

"Thomas Sargeant Perry Reading
a Newspaper" by Lilla Cabot Perry

"Lilla Cabot Perry was seventy-two years old and certainly deserved compliments for helping to supplement the family's modest income. 'Once when we were very hard up,' she recounted in 1929, 'I painted thirteen portraits in thirteen weeks, four sitters a day at two hours each.'

Along with the proceeds from her first New York solo exhibition, these funds helped ease some of the additional family expenses incurred when her daughter Edith's mental health totally collapsed, and she was transferred to a private institution. Edith's illness was the tragedy of Lilla's life. It was followed by two other traumatic events. Lilla herself became critically ill with diphtheria in late December 1923 and her granddaughter died suddenly of scarlet fever in 1924. 

These grave circumstances undoubtedly conditioned her retreat from the genteel portraits painted at her Fenway studio in Boston back to plein-air works and landscapes, which highlighted the last chapter of her life. The subtle portrait of her husband, half-hidden behind his morning newspaper, is one of the first canvases Lilla painted during her long convalescence. The delicate harmony here of muted blue and mauve tones, bathed in the softly filtered sunlight, adds a subtle note to the sensitive portrait of this distinguished New England gentleman in the twilight years of his life. Symbolically, the curtains are closed.

Charleston, South Carolina, where she continued her convalescence is far distant from Giverny, but the memories of those nine summers spent in Monet's village, 'the happiest of her life,' were constantly present as she painted some of her finest landscapes at the age of seventy-seven. 'Road from Charleston to Savannah,' for example, which depicts in the Impressionist manner a group of live oaks laden with Spanish moss along a sunlit road, definitely recalls the charm of 'Poplars,' painted thirty years before in Giverny."

To be continued

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