With this in mind, we can begin to see through her portraits of her daughters how Perry, unlike Monet, was more interested in the symbolism of flowers than their visual characteristics. Returning to Alice in the Lane (1891) done in her second year in Giverny, the focus of the viewer is on Perry’s daughter Alice is in the act of plucking a flower in the garden. Perry does an excellent job portraying the landscape’s atmosphere with unfinished brushstrokes, a sharp perspective and vivid colors. While Perry does borrow Monet’s fashion for composing light and atmosphere outdoors, the piece is not simply a technical study. Specifically, we see how few flowers inhabit the garden, just as Alice is the only person inhabiting a barren road. Perry’s children, due to the family’s constant traveling, rarely made stable friends outside the family (Martindale 20), and here Perry is perhaps regretting their solidarity by linking the singular flowers with her lonely daughter. Perry was not creating copies or derivatives of Monet’s garden scenes, but instead works with its own individuality and character. Just like in her past poetry, Perry began using flowers as an aesthetic tool to reflect her own emotions on women (in this case, her young daughter), rather than forgetting about the object in front of her, as Monet would have suggested she do.
As Perry’s daughters matured into young women, so did her own philosophy to her works; they became more and more visual realizations of her most personal poetry on flowers rather than a demonstration of Monet’s modern principles. In Portrait of Mrs. Joseph Clark Grew (1906), Perry provides an intimate indoors portrayal of Alice years later, just prior to her marriage. This latter portrait illustrates not so much the artist’s technical progression but rather her continued adoration for her daughter and flowers. Perry had always been appreciative of her youngest daughter’s untouched beauty, and as result was ambivalent towards her eventual marriage, a common reaction from mothers of her time (Martindale 54). Like many turn of the century American artists, Perry carried a newfound appreciation for expressing nostalgia in art (Martindale 54) and in Portrait of Mrs. Joseph Clark Grew, nostalgia is reflected in Alice’s facial expression and color: pale, solemn, and dignified. Contemporary art critic John Nutting wrote of how Perry accomplished this effect: “The bunch of violets on the corsage offset and emphasize the ivory tones of the complexion” (qtd. Martindale 62). Nutting suggests that rather than use direct shading, Perry strategically places the violet corsage to bring out the light tones of Alice’s face; in that light, the flower would solely be a technical artistic tool, or even a demonstration of the technical abilities of color variation that the artist picked up while studying with Monet. However, given what is known of Perry’s poetic background, the violets take on additional meaning. In one of her translations of Greek poetry, Perry writes: “The rose but blossoms for a space/Would’st look for it when past?” (Perry, From the Garden of Hellas, 74) In the context of this kind of nostalgic sentiment, the corsage is the perfect poetic symbol of Alice Perry’s state just prior to marriage: beautiful, in full “blossom”, and most importantly still untouched. Of course, the fact is that her daughter will one day lose her beauty, and wither like a flower. Perry accepted this unfortunate parallel between her daughters and flowers and brought it to the reader’s attention in the painting. While critics like Nutting esteem Perry’s piece as a superior technical achievement or even a celebration of Monet’s abilities as a teacher, the reality is that through the piece Lilla Perry reflects on a much more personal issue. Just as in her earlier poetry, the painting would be senseless, even derivative, without a personal emotional engagement and the symbolism of the flowers.
Images:
Alice in the Lane. 1891 Private Collection, Location Unknown
Portrait of Ms. Joseph Clark Grew. 1903-04 Personal Collection of Mr. and Mrs. T. Gordon Hutchinson, Location Unknown.