Photographs from glass-plate
negative of Monet's
first studio and grounds in Giverny, ca. 1905-1906. Photographer Lilla Cabot Perry.
Lilla Cabot Perry photographs, [ca. 1889-1909]. Donated by James Holsaert, 1984.
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The Archives includes a wealth of material on American artists who studied and traveled abroad, including Lilla Cabot Perry's photographs and glass-plate negatives of Claude Monet and his house and gardens at Giverny around 1889 to 1909.
Perry (1848-1933), herself a painter, first went to Giverny with her husband, Thomas Sergeant Perry, a philosophy professor at Harvard, in the summer of 1889. The Perrys spent 10 summers at Giverny. They lived next door to Monet and were often invited to his studio.
Perry later wrote her reminiscences of Monet in the American Magazine of Art (March 1927): "I had been greatly impressed by this (to me) new painter whose work had a clearness of vision and a fidelity to nature as I had never seen before."
Her much-reproduced photographs convey the tranquil beauty of Giverny, which became a mecca for artists in the late 19th century. They are particularly important because they show the house, Japanese footbridge, pond, and gardens as they were when Monet first painted them.