The accomplished poet and translator Lilla Cabot Perry (1848-1933) is better known as one of the American Impressionists who studied with Claude Monet in Giverny and later championed him when introducing his works to the American public. The artistic pilgrimage from the United States to Europe that she and countless others made was popular by the end of the nineteenth century, but what is unusual about Perry is that she lived in Japan for three years at the turn in the twentieth century, from 1898 to 1901, because her husband, Thomas Sergeant Perry (1845-1928), a scholar and critic, was invited by Keio University to teach English literature. In this paper, I argue that this sojourn in Japan at the turn into the twentieth century allows Lilla Cabot Perry to reassess and revise her identity as an artist, wife, and mother through a consideration of how she configures domestic space and her relationship to it.

Unlike many women artists of her generation, Perry’s training in painting began relatively late in life: she was thirty-six when she started taking lessons in Boston, after twelve years of marriage and the birth of her three daughters, Margaret, Edith, and Alice. Her commitment to her marriage and to her family, despite shaky finances, suggests that she privileged her domestic space as her daughters were growing up on both sides of the Atlantic, even as she developed into a critically acclaimed painter whose artwork sales supplemented the family income. By the turn of the century, her reputation as an artist had taken hold but that did not assuage her worries about her husband who no longer seemed to desire professional work. However, he did accept the Keio professorship, which in turn made it possible for the family to live and travel in Japan.

Perry’s home in Tokyo served as a venue for her remarkable skills as a hostess and cultural ambassador. For instance, after a few months in Tokyo, Perry organized a “grand musical reception” at her home for eighty guests, mostly from the foreign community, and entertained them with musical performances by her daughters and other musicians, both amateur and professional, and then provided refreshments for all afterwards. This event, staged within her domestic space, showcased how she seamlessly adapted her Boston Brahmin values and European hospitality with great ease within Tokyo’s small cosmopolitan community. However, once her home base was established, she gradually relinquished social engagements in preference for her painting which she pursued enthusiastically both in Tokyo and Karuizawa, where the family spent their summers, and in other parts of Japan to which she traveled. This was possible because their move to Tokyo had solved many of her problems: her husband now had a job which provided them with a steady income, he enjoyed most of his social engagements in Tokyo and compensated for her detachment from society, the daughters were old enough to not require constant supervision, and Japan provided her with new material for her paintings.

Arguably, Perry’s most interesting painting from her Japan period is The Trio, Tokyo, Japan (1898-1901) which depicts her three daughters playing the piano, the cello, and the violin in what we may assume is a Japanese-style room in their home in Tokyo. We can see that in this painting, especially when compared to John Singer Sargent’s The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882) which uses Japanese urns to accentuate the otherness of the children portrayed, Perry incorporates and naturalizes Japanese elements instead of making them exotic. This painting, then, represents the lived reality of the Perry household in Japan and illustrates how Perry earned the freedom to expand and hone her skills and sensibilities as an artist while she explored a Japan most of her contemporaries only knew secondhand.