At the River's Bend (On the River II)

Lilla Cabot Perry · 1895

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

65.5 × 81.5 cm (25 13/16 × 32 1/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Impressionism

At the River's Bend (On the River II) captures the shifting light and quiet movement of water with the loose, confident brushwork that defined Lilla Cabot Perry's mature Impressionist style. Perry was one of the foremost American Impressionists of the late nineteenth century, a painter who moved fluidly between portraiture and landscape and brought a distinctly personal warmth to both. By 1895 she had spent several summers at Giverny as a neighbour of Claude Monet, absorbing his approach to outdoor light while developing a handling of paint that remained very much her own — broader in stroke, more openly gestural, less concerned with the dissolution of form. Perry is well documented as one of the earliest American artists to meet Monet directly and to champion his work to audiences back home, writing about his methods in ways that shaped how American collectors and critics understood Impressionism. Now held in the Art Institute of Chicago, this painting rewards close looking: the surface is alive with layered colour and the kind of spontaneous mark-making that only comes from working in front of the subject. The hand-painted oil reproduction replicates that surface quality — the impasto, the tonal shifts, the feeling of light on moving water — in a way that a print simply cannot.