"The papers spoke very well of my works, in fact better than I would have thought they would, as I was a foreigner. However, harsh observations were made insofar as the exposed nudity was concerned: . . . I was in fact the first to have risked exhibiting nude figures in America, in Boston in particular. I had removed the veil of chastity and purity from Puritanism."
Whatever disappointments Juglaris may have felt over the lack of acknowledgement for his Michigan Capitol commission, he continued to blaze new trails in Boston. He took particular pride in making the nude a more conspicuous presence in a city famous for its propriety, if not prudery.
Unsurprisingly, given the size and cultural importance of their city for the nation, the citizens of Boston were not unfamiliar with the nude in art. As far back as 1848, Hiram Powers’ famous marble statue, The Greek Slave, had been exhibited to large crowds under a tented pavilion on the Boston Commons in 1848. Moreover, a local Boston artist, Edward Augusus Brackett, had soon followed this success up with a showing of his own large, sculpted work, Shipwrecked Mother and Child, which thereafter was to find successive homes in the statuary halls of the Boston Athenaeum and the Worcester Art Museum. Yet both statutes were carved from classical cold white marble, perceived as minimizing any sensuality. They were each further veiled or enshrouded in thick moral narrative that lent itself to pity rather than prurience.
A generation later, in 1878, the budding artist Thomas Wilmer Dewing had also proved bold and daring enough to exhibit two small academic nudes in the rented Boylston Street rooms of the Boston Art Club. At the same time, however one of Dewing’s two paintings, The Sorcerer’s Slave, presented a pre-pubescent boy whose fate or condition or fate was not in his own hands. Likewise, Dewing’s second painting, A Musician, was a portrait of a slumbering young female violinist with a single breast exposed. Her sleeping innocence implicitly laid any moral onus, giving rise to judgment, upon the intrusive viewer.
In contrast, when Juglaris arrived in Boston and exhibited his Paris Salon painting,
The Invasion, at the Boston Museum’s ‘Living American Artists’ Exhibition in November 1880, his depicted half-naked barbarian family seemed in all their supple, exposed flesh more cooly and offensively brazen. The fact that
The Invasion was on open public view only a year-and-a-half after the founding of the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice in the vestry of nearby Park Street Church in May 1878, likely made Juglaris’s painting even more provocative.
“The papers soke very well of my works, in fact, far better than I would have thought they would, as I was foreigner. However, harsh observations were made insofar as the exposed nudity was concerned… I was in fact the first to have risked exhibiting nude figures in America, in Boston in particular. I had removed the veil of chastity and purity from Puritanism. They forgave me because I was a foreigner, but hard things were said to the [organizing] committee and the [museum’s] administrators…”
At most, Juglaris can be accused of only a little overstatement—not hubris. Thereafter, Juglaris continued to be resolutely identified with those advocating on behalf of greater freedom for the full display of the human form in art.
While the Boston Museum of Fine Arts School remained reluctant to allow too much freedom and latitude in the use of nude male models for a special drawing class launched as recently as 1879 with students paying extra for the opportunity, Juglaris was soon advising the Boston Art Club on how it might install a suitable space for nude modeling at its new clubhouse facility, opening in February 1882. Indeed, Juglaris’s hope and goal was to replicate the kind of “theater of the nude” for student artists along the lines of what he had personally known in Turin and Paris. Before long, Juglaris, selected as the Boston Art Club’s instructor-in-residence through an open competition, was actually leading its amphitheater-type classes in figural drawing with nude or semi-nude models.
Both directly and indirectly through his own example and support, Juglaris contributed to a more tempered and tolerant civic sensibility with regard to public displays of the nude in art. However incremental, the progress made was telling. in 1883, Boston’s William & Everett Gallery, which was soon exhibiting Juglaris’s own drawings and paintings, successfully displayed without undue public outrage Automedon and the Horses of Achilles. A potentially unsettling narrative painting by French artist Georges Henri Regnault, it was a full, frontal nude of a well-muscled Automedon grasping with outstretched arm the bridle of one of Achilles’s horses. Subsequently, the owner of Regnault’s dramatic work, Samuel Coale of St. Louis, loaned it to the Boston Fine Arts Museum on an extended basis. Thanks to evolving social acceptance and funds earnestly raised by Museum School students, who were not put off by its nudity at all, Automedon and the Horses of Achilles was ultimately acquired by the Boston Museum outright.
Progress continued afoot. In November 1885, the Boston Art Club was able to welcome to its own galleries—albeit, not without additional stir and controversy--an exhibition by the Society of Amateur Photographers, also known as the Boston Camera Club. Anticipating the later renowned nude studies of Dedham, Massachusetts native Fred Holland Day, who joined the Boston Camera Club in 1889, the show conspicuously included male nude images.
Never shy about seizing the day, Juglaris made the nude an even more public and permanent fixture for Boston before the same year, 1885, ended. Unveiled in his Bromfield Street studio was a full-body portrait of a statuesque and exuberantly posed nude woman, holding an uplifted cup in celebration. Entitled Mlle. Yvonne, the painting was soon duly installed two streets over at the Locke-Ober’s “Men’s Bar”, a popular restaurant on Winter Place, just a half-block from the Boston Commons. Part of a wave of “saloon nudes” by such major European artists as Jules Lefebvre and Adloph Bouguereau, Juglaris’s Mlle. Yvonne was to become for succeeding generations a cherished Boston icon. The significance of the painting was already recognized in Juglaris’s time. When fellow artists gathered to honor Juglaris’s contribution to the city’s art life, each table was conspicuously festooned with a centerpiece image of the nude Yvonne.