In recognition as an important American woman impressionist, Lilla Cabot Perry is perhaps second only to her contemporary, Mary Cassatt. And if her work seems to fall short of the more famous artist's compositional finesse, luminosity, and evocative mood, Perry's biographers are quick to point out that painting was far from her undivided life pursuit. Unlike Cassatt (link), who never married, Perry was a devoted wife and mother to her three daughters. What is more, she painted essentially for her own satisfaction, and though she was a strong advocate for impressionism generally, she was not an aggressive promoter of her own work. Significantly, she was also an accomplished poet, publishing her verse in four volumes. (Of special note, the third volume, released in 1898, was titled Impressions.)

The artist was born in Boston in 1848, and was a member of the socially prominent Lowell and Cabot families. In 1874 she married Thomas Sargent Perry, a scholar in eighteenth-century English literature, author, and teacher, who was himself from a distinguished family. He was the grand-nephew of Commodore Matthew C. Perry, who had opened Japan to American commercial and social exchange in 1853-54. It was not until a decade after the marriage that Mrs. Perry took her first professional art instruction at Boston's Cowles School under Dennis Bunker and Robert Vonnoh. Vonnoh, particularly, had studied in Paris only a year before, and had adopted a kind of early or pre-impressionist style in the manner of his teacher there, Jules Bastien-Lepage. Perry went on to study in Paris at the Julian and Colarossi Academies, and independently with Belgian impressionist Alfred Stevens. In the summer of 1889, the Perrys visited Giverny, a village in Normandy on the Seine River, northwest of Paris, where they met Claude Monet. Monet established few close relationships outside his family and took no students. Yet he was cordial to Perry and encouraged her in her work. Through Monet, Perry befriended painter Camille Pissarro, who also lived close by. Back in America that fall, Perry brought with her one of Monet's dazzling views at Etretat. She commented some time later:

"When I took it home that autumn of 1889 (I think it was the first Monet ever seen in Boston), to my great astonishment, hardly anyone liked it, the one exception being John LaFarge."

As an interesting aside, LaFarge was Perry's brother-in-law and he decorated the drawing room of Perry's Marlborough Street home, a home that became a gathering place for artists and writers of the day. The Perrys spent the next ten summers at Giverny occupying the house immediately next door to Monet. Recalling her friendship, Perry wrote "Reminiscences of Claude Monet from 1889 to 1909," which was published in the American Magazine of Art, March 1927.

In 1898 Thomas Perry accepted a professorship in English literature at Keiogijiku College in Tokyo. During the three years the family lived in Japan, the artist painted more than eighty pictures of Japanese people and settings.

The Hunter Museum's oil, A Stream Beneath Poplars, though undated, was probably painted on one of the Giverny summers prior to the departure for Japan. Laura L. Meixner notes a similarity in format, composition, and technique between Perry's painting and John Leslie Breck's The River Ept, Giverny, which is dated 1886. A fellow Bostonian, Breck was one of the first Americans to go to Giverny (after studying at Munich and the Acadmie Julian in Paris). It cannot necessarily be concluded that he influenced her, or she him. But it is known that Perry admired Breck, and in subsequent years invited him to show his work at her Boston home.

Perry's style -- especially when seen next to Breck and much other American impressionist painting -- is comparatively calligraphic. She rarely made preparatory drawings or even oil sketches, preferring to work directly on canvas. As a result, she had a tendency to draw with the brush, often applying her pigment in long, thin traces, and allowing the canvas to remain visible between brush strokes. In A Stream Beneath Poplars the linear effect defines the tall grasses at the creek's edge, and in juxtaposition suggests tree trunks and branches.

In 1914 Perry was one of the founding members and the first secretary of the Guild of Boston Artists, a group that included Edmund C. Tarbell, Frank W. Benson, John J. Enneking, and Maurice B. Prendergast. Many of her late paintings were shown in guild exhibitions, including still bright, impressionist landscapes of the rolling hills around Hancock, New Hampshire. The Perrys had purchased a house at Hancock in 1903 that they used chiefly as a summer residence. In the last few years of the artist's life, she remained at Hancock year round, and it was there she died in February 1933. The Boston Art Club presented a memorial exhibition of her paintings the following October and November. For that occasion, fellow guild member Tarbell wrote: "No wonder that ... Monet and Pissarro admired her work, for Mrs. Perry was a most beautiful and personal talent."