When her daughters did mature and leave her care, Perry grew even more conservative as a portrait artist; she began painting posed scenes that directly linked back to her poems and eschewed many of Monet’s teachings. We see the separation of Perry’s philosophy from her French master especially in a later portrait, where she no longer had her daughters serve as models, but nevertheless used flowers indoors to symbolize filial love. The easiest parallel to make between Perry’s poems and flowers is to link her portrait done before 1911, Cherry Blossoms with the aforementioned poem of the same title done decades earlier. In the painting, Perry portrays her favorite child model of the time (since her daughters were now too old), Hildegarde, intently fixated on the bowl of cherry blossoms. Perry paints the girl with the same care and love that she described in
the poem from the previous century; she has conveyed the same scene and emotion through two different art-forms but with the same flower as the key symbol. This suggests that one of the main reasons Perry learned to paint was to visually bring her poem into life, the kind of plan Monet most certainly would not have favored for his landscapes. The Frenchman’s influences on Perry are noticeable here only in the lighting and shading; however she has taken the bowl of cherry blossoms and the girl indoors, away from the gardens of Giverny and into a much more intimate, arranged, and purposeful environment. Most importantly, Perry had chosen to portray her subjects no longer en plein air as was Monet’s favorite style, but rather in a “test tube”. The symbolism of the flowers makes Perry’s portrait not simply a study of a haphazard scene, but rather a staged dramatization of her former verse creation.
Perry’s last significant portraits with flowers signify the completion of her progression as a “lyrical artist,” namely that she created portraits where the symbolism of flowers begged for their own verse counterparts. Back in her native New England, Perry painted Lady with a Bowl of Violets in 1910, a portrait of a professional model next to a bowl of flowers. Just like Cherry Blossoms, the scene is staged so Perry can bring in the cropped bowl of the top left corner, at this point almost a signature of her portraits of young women. William Downes of The Boston Evening Transcript wrote that the piece provided evidence that Perry had essentially “abandoned” the Giverny School of outdoor light (Martindale 66). Instead, Perry’s art had embraced her existing fascination with flowers to the point that in a portrait done a year later, Roses(1911), Perry puts her professional female model behind a bowl of roses with her back turned to the viewer. Martindale suggests that the roses suggest the presence of a lover in the vicinity of the model, due to the natural symbolism of the flower. The focus of the piece and the implied context is derived from the prominent position of the bowl of flowers. While these pieces do not have direct links to Perry’s poetry in the same way that Cherry Blossoms does, their models deserve a back story and identity; the same narrative effect that her poems with flowers, like “To a Sick Wife”, is accomplished now through her portraits. Rather than imitating Monet or even visually materializing her past poems, Perry matured enough as an artist so that she could express her sentiments on the challenges of femininity through both her poetry and portraits by drawing upon the widely known symbolism of flowers.
Images:
Cherry Blossoms. 1911. Personal Collection of Elaine and Elliot Caplow, Location Unknown.
Roses. Prior to 1911. Personal Colletion of Mr. and Mrs. Jeffrey Marcus, Location Unknown
Lady with a Bowl of Violets. 1910. National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC.