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Artist Dates: 1848 - 1933
Painting Title: Lady in a Kimono Painting Date: ca. 1910
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Signature: Unsigned
Provenance: Private Collection Condition: Good
Size Unframed: 32 x 26 Framed: 41 x 33 Frame Condition: Antique Very Good
Artist Best Price: $115,000
Our Price: $30,000
But we think Perry supressed our partially incomplete work because the image of Alice as Geisha proved too sensuous for her. (Similarly she left Playing by Heart [1897], which has Alice at the piano, unfinished and unsigned. And Perry is known to have suppressed earlier works focused on her daughter Edith, who was tragically institutionalized for a nervous breakdown in 1924—with signs of her condition manifest earlier.) Martindale sees the sensuous element finally entering Perry’s women in 1907, with the Le Paravent Jaune (the Yellow Screen), where she links the French model to Madame Bovary. But we think our Lady in the Kimono is an even more brilliant and sensual work, conceptually posing the young Boston Brahmin girl in the garb of a Japanese geisha, to make a daring and powerful statement about gender, with a reminder that the Japanese geisha’s white mask protects her identity from the subservience of her performance. We think Alice’s sexuality creates a confrontation with the viewer that Perry was forced to repress. And note that Alice's kimono is obviously the imported real thing, with a regal gold blazon on the shoulder rendered in impasto, and so different from those seen in Hassam’s White Kimono or Robert Reid's Violet Kimono. And it is very notable, we believe, that aside from the Young Girl in a Kimono, we only see one other full-length woman in a kimono in Perry’s work, in A Japanese Print (1917) from the later period of her society figure studies, where the model in another luxurious kimono is turned away from the viewer, leaving her face hidden and without the sexual challenge that emanates from our work.
By 1909, Alice had given birth, and the Grews visited the Perrys in their last days in Giverny, where the daughter Lilla Cabot Grew will be painted. Grew was later American ambassador to Turkey. His final posting, from 1932-42, was as ambassador to Japan. Alice Perry Grew went back to Japan for some ten years—and she looked up the Perry’s personal servants, including the maid Tsune whose daughter was posed for Perry's Child with an Orange and who was her playmate from her first childhood visit. And Grew was stationed in Japan at the time of Pearl Harbor—and was then repatriated as a diplomat to Washington to work with a group on an alternative peace plan that rejected the atomic bomb as a solution. Given the high tension of World War II, and the rampant American anti-Japanese sentiment that led to internment under FDR—we have to think that our painting underwent even greater suppression in the hands of the Perry family—perhaps even loosing its signature. Certainly 1942 was no time for a painting of the American ambassador’s wife as a young beauty wearing a Japanese kimono!
An earlier unsigned painting, which we show below, and which recently sold with the division of the Woolworth estate has now come to light, and we think this work makes a very important comment on our own offering. The Girl in a Red Bonnet is described as: “Unsigned. Canvas has been cut and restretched with one original side showing. On the right hand quarter quadrant margin it appears there has been an overpainted area.” Our own piece is similarly heavily overpainted on the left side in the drapery, where there may have been an attempt to narrow the canvas, and we also find an overpainted rectangular area in the lower left quadrant. We suspect that both works were suppressed by Perry and ended up in the hands of her family after her death, and we strongly believe that the condition of both paintings indicates an attempt to remove or obscure the original signature. But finally it is Alice in the painting! And we think this painting could only have been done by Perry herself—and that its very survival sends a message of authenticity.
