Career
She completed what is considered to be her earliest known painting, Portrait of an Infant (Margaret Perry) dating from 1877–78. This work draws on the inspiration that would occupy much of her artwork throughout her career – her children. Perry had three children, Margaret (1876), Edith (1880), and Alice (1884).
In 1884 Perry began her formal artistic training with the portrait painter Alfred Quentin Collins. Collins had studied at the Académie Julian in Paris under the guidance of Leon Bonnat. Bonnat’s other students included Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, Walter Gay, and Frederic Vinton. Perry’s The Beginner, ca. 1885–86, represents the first work she completed under formal guidance. The Beginner echoes Collins’ influences with the sitter’s serious gaze, dark background, and emphasis on dramatic lighting.
While Perry learned the more formal aspects of art-making with Collins, it was not until 1885 that she finally found an artist who truly inspired her personal style. In that year Perry worked with Robert Vonnoh, an artist who worked in the Impressionist’s plein-air style at Grez-Sur-Loing in France. Vonnoh’s work represented a distinct departure from the formal style Perry had been exposed to and it was this experience that planted the seeds for Perry’s lifelong dedication to Impressionism.
The year 1885 was significant in the development of Perry’s personal artistic style. In addition to her exposure to Vonnoh’s unorthodox artistic style, during that same year she also took classes with instructor Dennis Bunker at the prestigious Cowles Art School in Boston. Cowles taught its students “liberal theories” in the creation of realist art – theories that Perry greatly responded to.
Read more about this topic: Lilla Cabot Perry
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“Work-family conflicts—the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child—would not be forced upon women with such sanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children.”
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin (20th century)