“[W]e spent the evening merrily talking of art and artists, of business affairs, and of works to be published of which I would be the editor and designer.”
“In Paris I was a Parisian, here now I behave as an American. Certain things you don’t do, nor do you talk about them. Here we are a nation of puritans and that is the way we must live, you shall see. You shall see!” (Fellow artist John Ward Dunsmore to Juglaris, Fall, 1880).
“[I]t being Sunday and a holiday the laws do not allow you to do any work at all, not at home nor in public and that we therefore had to go to church instead of hanging around to sketch and paint…we returned home shocked and discouraged with a sense of pity towards that republic so enslaved and dominated by contrary religions.”
The Boston that awaited Tommaso Juglaris as he took ship and train from New York City had a longstanding reputation as the “Athens of America” –all thanks to its fine educational and cultural institutions and past contributions of its famous residents to literature, philosophy, religion, and the sciences. However, even as the very traditional sounds of horse-drawn carriages, drays, and tipcarts pounding Boston’s stone pavements lingered, it was on the cusp of a new decade a city poised for dynamic change. Complementing the cultural life already offered by its art clubs, literary societies, colleges, and fine arts museum, a full symphony orchestra was being organized. Technical advances were also afoot. Electric lights were soon to make their appearance at the posh Hotel Vendome on Commonwealth Avenue and other public venues. Midway through the 1880s would come the introduction of electric street cars and bicycles favored by the young.
Meanwhile, the hold upon civic life of Boston’s elite Brahmin class, who were mostly Unitarian and Trinitarian Congregationalists by religious persuasion and broad-minded in many respects but still very Puritan in a plethora of ways, remained strong. The resulting civic culture of the period is referenced in the early pages of George Santayana’s famous and somewhat autobiographical novel, The Last Puritan (1935). It is also underscored by the remarks of the social commentator Ralph Davoll writing about the Boston Art Club for the New England Magazine. As late as the first decade of the twentieth century, Davoll not unfairly observed:
“When we analyze that the name ‘Boston’s stands for in the minds of the American people, it appears to be not so much proverbial aesthetic culture as a moral earnestness. Boston is the cradle of duty more than beauty.” [New England Magazine, 43/4 (January 1911): 427]
While the fresh rich fortunes locally spawned during America’s materialistic Gilded Age did seem at the time to presage greater socio-cultural change, Juglaris by his nature, nationality, and artistic propensities would inevitably test the extent to which Boston’s old insularity had actually dissolved, making it more truly welcoming at all levels of society to outsiders and newcomers, especially those neither Anglo-Saxon nor Protestant.
Arriving in Boston on Sunday, August 22, 1880, Juglaris received an initial welcome that appeared entirely warm and sincere. Greeting him at the train station was none other than his new employer, Louis Prang. On a subsequent factory tour of the Prang operations in West Roxbury, a neighborhood annexed by Boston in 1874, the German-born publisher explained Juglaris’s forthcoming duties. As artistic director, Juglaris would be responsible for selecting and revising all artwork. That night a Prang associate hosted a dinner at his own home with Juglaris as an honored guest. Full of talk about future projects, the evening was both congenial and auspicious. Juglaris was elated. The night seemed to validate every hope he had for a bright future in America.
After settling into lodgings near the Boston Commons and starting work at the Prang factory, Juglaris tried to look up two Boston residents he had known well back in France when they were all part of Thomas Couture’s circle at Villiers-le-Bel. Francis “Frank” Millet did not respond to his inquiries, but Juglaris was able to meet with young John Ward Dunsmore. Although in Paris Dunsmore had led a free-and-easy life complete with a mistress, he was now a very proper man. In his new role as Boston society painter, always trolling for portrait commissions among the city’s matrons, he was impeccably dressed and morally circumspect, not even willing to acknowledge that he drank anymore. Dunsmore warned Juglaris about Boston’s puritanical ways. “You shall see!” he said. Before long, Juglaris did see, learning first-hand what Dunsmore was talking about.
With his duties at the Prang firm limited to four hours per day, Juglaris was committed to devoting the rest of his time to painting “some works of art to exhibit and make myself known” to the Boston art world. One Sunday morning, inspired by the spectacular beauty of a New England autumn, Juglaris and a fellow artist from Prang, who could speak only a little more English than he did, travelled to nearby Brookline to paint the colorful fall foliage. They had barely set up their easels when a policeman accosted and arrested them. Hauled to a police station, Juglaris and his companion were promptly informed that working on Sunday was against the law. Fortunately, the pair was released with just a warning. But Juglaris was astonished that such Sunday restrictions should exist at all. Even more absurd was the notion that creating art was considered manual labor in Boston! According to Juglaris, his arrest in Brookline was the talk of Boston the next day.
As American constitutional historian Steven K. Green has quoted Yale College’s Timothy Dwight from seven decades earlier (1819), the “Sabbath is observed in New England with a greater degree of sobriety and strictness than in any other part of the world.” This remained true for Boston even in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Consequently, the Brookline episode was not the last time Juglaris ran afoul of Boston’s “Blue Laws” or “Sunday Laws.” Neighbors called police after overhearing him—in the privacy of his own quarters—wielding a hammer on a Sunday, unpacking cases containing his Paris Salon paintings. Juglaris quickly learned that in Boson he was not even the master of his own castle on the Sabbath.>