As a member of a distinguished Boston family who received her first formal art training at age 36, Lilla Cabot Perry was unlikely to become a professional painter, let alone a devotee of the French movement known as impressionism. Yet she did precisely that, developing a solid reputation during her lifetime as a painter and a poet, helping to promote impressionist art in the United States and Japan.

In 1874 Lilla Cabot married Thomas Sargeant Perry, a university professor of 18th-century English literature, with whom she had three daughters. The family traveled widely, living in Paris from 1887 to 1889, where Lilla studied painting at two well-known schools-the Académie Colarossi and the Académie Julian; she also trained in Munich and copied old-master paintings in Italy, England, and Spain. It was in 1889, when she was 41 years old, that Perry saw her first impressionist painting in a Paris gallery. The experience literally changed her life; Perry sought out the artist, Monet, and became his close friend. For nine summers the Perrys rented a house at Giverny, near Monet's, and while he never took pupils, he often advised Perry on her art.

For three years, between 1898 and 1901, the family resided in Japan, where Thomas Perry taught at Tokyo's Keiogijiku University. This gave Lilla a rare opportunity to study the sources of impressionism, Japanese fabrics and prints, in depth. There she produced some 80 paintings; she continued to be prolific throughout her life.

Back home, Perry worked in Boston during the year and on a New Hampshire farm during the summers. To supplement her husband's income, she painted portraits and impressionistic landscapes. Perry exhibited her work at the Paris Salon and the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1893) and won medals for her paintings at important exhibitions in Boston, St. Louis, and San Francisco. She was active in numerous arts organizations and published four volumes of verse.