In this glowing portrait, the American impressionist painter Lilla Cabot Perry (1848 – 1933) renders, in loose and expressive brush strokes, a fashionable young woman sipping a cup of tea. Initially trained in an academic style, Perry traveled to France in 1887, first to Paris and then to Giverny, where she forged the close friendship with Claude Monet. Her technical and aesthetic approach was further informed by three years in Japan, where she met Okakura Kakuzo (1863 – 1913), a cofounder of the imperial art school, who exhibited her work in Tokyo.
Photographed in the LA County Museum of Art (LACMA)




