Lilla Cabot Perry: Reminiscences of Monet, Pt. 1

"Cliffs at Etretat" by Claude Monet

"As Monet refused to take pupils and almost never granted interviews, Lilla Cabot Perry's article from 1927 reproduced here provides a rare insight into the work of 'the world's greatest landscape artist,' in her words. Perry's initial observations published in 1894, when her memories were far more fresh in her mind, have received much less attention. For this reason large extracts from this early text are included among the present annotations."

"Reminiscences of Monet from 1889-1909" by Lilla Cabot Perry from The American Magazine of Art, March 1927, Vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 119-125:

"Monet is dead! How well I remember meeting him when we first went to Giverny in the summer of 1889! A talented young American sculptor told my husband and me that he had a letter of introduction to the painter, Claude Monet. He felt shy at going alone and implored us to go with him, which we were enchanted to do, having seen that very spring the great Monet-Rodin exhibition which had been a revelation to others besides myself. I had been greatly impressed by this (to me) new painter whose work had a clearness of vision and a fidelity to nature such as I had never seen before. 

The man himself, with his rugged honesty, his disarming frankness, his warm and sensitive nature, was fully as impressive as his pictures, and from this first visit dates a friendship which led us to spend ten summers at Giverny. For some seasons, indeed, we had the house and garden next to his, and he would sometimes stroll in and smoke his after-luncheon cigarette in our garden before beginning on his afternoon work. He was not then appreciated as he deserved to be, in fact that first summer I wrote to several friends and relatives in America to tell them that here was a very great artist only just beginning to be known, whose pictures could be bought from his studio in Giverny for the sum of $500. 

I was a student in the Paris studios at that time and had shown at the Salon for the first time that spring, so it was natural that my judgment should have been distrusted. Only one person responded and for him I bought a picture of Etretat. Monet said he had to do something to the sky before delivering it as the clouds did not quite suit him, and, characteristically, to do this he must needs go down to Etretat and wait for a day with as near as possible the same sky and atmosphere, so it was some little time before I could take possession of the picture. When I brought it home that autumn of 1889 (I think it was the first Monet ever seen in Boston), to my great astonishment hardly any one liked it, the one exception being John La Farge."

To be continued

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