young female, black marble base, foundry mark of A. Valsuani, 11 1/2", well listed artist....Known as one of Robert Henri’s most precocious students and colleagues, Clara Greenleaf Perry was born near Long Branch, New Jersey, August 22, 1871. After her early education, she studied independently with Robert Henri in New York at the Art Students League and at the School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts with Edmond Tarbell and Frank Benson, two giants in the development of new representational art at the turn of the century in the United States.Then, Perry set out for Europe where she established a studio and took additional classes at the Academy Julian with M. R. Collins, before exhibiting her oil paintings and pastel work at the Paris-based Salons of the Beaux Arts group, from her new home and studio in Paris and from her summer retreat at Chavaniac-Lafayette, Haute Loire, France.After several extensive tours throughout Europe including painting sojourns in Madrid, Spain and throughout Surrey, England, she returned to New York where she again studied with Henri to perfect her paintings of everyday life in a colorful and painterly style of visible brushstroke and the psychological tone of the new Realism. This was championed by Henri and a group of accomplished artists such as John Sloan and Walt Kuhn who together with Henri and Perry and others, organized a landmark exhibition in 1910 of paintings from their new group known as the Society of Independent Artists. This exhibition was in direct and organized opposition to the strict rules and procedures of the conservative National Academy of Art, who controlled the best public exhibitions in New York City.Following this explosive and popular modern exhibition, Perry exhibited a body of her work at a number of avant-garde galleries and museums open to new art forms and art styles, including a large exhibition of her oils at the Art Institute of Chicago in late 1910, and at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art in 1915, 1922 and 1923.Perry was a Member of the National Association of Women Artists, the Copley Society of Boston, the Society of Independent Artists, New York, The National Academy of Design, Women Painters and Sculptors, and the Washington Art Club. She was represented during her career in the United States and was later posthumously represented by Bakker Gallery, Boston through 1978.Active in the arts and arts organizations until the year of her death, Clara Greenleaf Perry died in her home in Long Branch, New Jersey, in 1960 at the age of 89 years. While she is briefly listed in a number of standard reference works including American Women Artists by Paul Sternberg, Sr., Who Was Who in American Art 1564-1975 Vol. III edited by Peter Hastings Falk, Perry, like a number of talented and important American women artists, almost forgotten by history, are currently under re-evaluation by a number of scholars and cultural activists interested in the important place of women artists in the development of American and International Modern and Contemporary art.In 2019, an important, representational and rare work by Clara Greenleaf Perry appeared in an auction sale by Winter and Associates in Plainview, Connecticut. This oil on canvas of a group of Gypsies camping on a public green probably dates from sometime around 1900, her time in Surrey, England, where bands of colorful and exotic traveling Romany continued to enjoy a dispensation granted their ancestors by King Henry VIII, who declared them free to occupy public green spaces for short periods of time in exchange of a yearly one-time tax levy paid to the King.Perry neatly divides her canvas of 16” by 22” in two horizontal masses, bracketing the Gypsy wagons as solid bookends at the dividing line between the bright and vibrant green of the open public land in the foreground, and the sky and privately owned harvested field of the background. Here is where she paints both individual representational Gypsy figures but also paints a mass of the Romany of all ages with their animals and possessions huddled together in their colorful apparel as symbols of the exotic, mysterious East, able to maintain their mysterious culture in the modern world at the turn of the century.Written and submitted by Gary R. Libby, Author and Art Historian

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