“I had finished my tenth year in the midst of the highest society that America could have . . . and I began my last year extremely satisfied, except my health.”
Amid Juglaris’s own personal successes and sorrows, there continued to be a mounting tide of nationalism across America that inevitably impacted him in Boston. To be sure, there were eddies and crosscurrents in American chauvinism. As art historian D. Roger Howlett notes in The Lynn Beach Painters, between 1882 and 1892, Boston, not at all closing itself off to the rest of the world but, rather, seeking to filter what came into its civic realm, “became a significant market for the best of the Paris Impressionists and their dealers.” This resulted in a groundbreaking showing of two Monet paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts in 1891, followed by an exhibition of twenty-one privately loaned Monet works just a year later at St. Botolph’s Club, which with its own share of artist-members was always more avant-garde than the Boston Art Club.
At the same time, there was a persistent call for cultural independence from Europe. In this vein, artist Charles H. Woodbury, whose future wife studied under Juglaris, was actually praised in print, circa 1887, as a landscapist who has “simply stayed home and painted nature as she looked to [him], uninfluenced by foreign travel or education.” Woodbury’s personal Black Book preserves the Boston-area press clipping which testifies to the spirit of the day, rendered not a little ironic given the fact that he subsequently ventured to Europe with his wife in 1891 to study for a half-year at the Academie Julian in Paris and then pursue further experience along the Dutch coast.
In the field of mural painting, which he regarded as his own great forte, Juglaris found himself, as the 1880s advanced, in competition with an emerging class of almost two dozen American-born muralists. Among them, there was much talk of forging a distinctively American art, more “democratic” and historical in subject matter and less beholden to traditional European themes and mythological motifs. Indeed, while willing to acknowledge exceptions, these highly competitive native-born American artists encouraged skepticism that foreign-born muralists like Juglaris could as ably as themselves truly capture and convey the essential American spirit and experience appropriate for art, particularly in public places. As art historians like Bailey Van Hook and Sarah J. Moore document, the so-called “American Renaissance” was essentially already in the making with vast mural projects ahead for American artists at the 1893 World Columbian Exposition, the Boston Public Library, and the Library of Congress.
Unfortunately, in the face of such American trends Juglaris could be his own worst enemy. Of a decidedly Old World bent favoring the tried and the true over the novel and not really inclined to follow the example of his Italian compatriot Constantino Brumidi at the U.S. Capitol, Juglaris preferred to adhere in choice of subject matter to what he considered classical and culturally universal rather than nationalistic and historically parochial.
For all these reasons and more Juglaris was experiencing a measure of marginalization in Boston: aspects of his career were stunted or dead-ended. In 1887, for instance, ground had been broken at Copley Square for a new Boston Public Library with plans to make it an artistically rich edifice. But the architect, Charles Follen McKim, was open in his declared intention to highlight through the fresh construction the genius of American artistic talent, which was likely to exclude an immigrant artist like Juglaris.
Juglaris also found himself overlooked or bypassed for the mural decoration of the lavishly appointed Back Bay residence of Frederick Lothrop Ames in 1888-89. What could only have made this a point of chagrin was the fact that Frederick Ames was the son of Governor Oliver Ames, Jr., whose nearby mansion Juglaris had earlier decorated with friezes—and to considerable acclaim as well. Secondly, the kind of decorative work sought out by the younger Ames was aligned with Juglaris’s own native sensibilities. Yet, as recounted by art historian Christopher Carlsmith, Frederick Ames instead tapped the French Orientalist painter Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant to execute a multi-panel cycle “representing a procession of aristocrats in Venice, and four additional murals depicting Byzantine rulers and their courtiers” for a grand hall with a monumental rectangular staircase rising three stories beneath a domed rotunda skylight with stained glass by John LaFarge. As Benjamin-Constant subsequently explained in a letter to Mrs. Frederick Ames:
“Your large staircase being of Renaissance style, nothing could be more appropriate and harmonize better than Venetian subjects at the time of Veronese, and composed in the sentiment of the school of Veronese. Thus, on a ground of architectures borrowed from the best known monuments of Venice.” [Carlsmith, “Venetian Doge in a Yankee Court,” 33, 38-39, 42]
In embracing the style of Veronese in its “energetic brushwork and panoply of figures,” as noted by Carlsmith, Benjamin-Constant was treading on artistic territory that Juglaris had already explored in his own monumental Paris Salon painting, Paolo Veronese at Venice, a decade earlier. An upshot of the whole Boston project was Benjamin-Constant’s easel painting of a Venetian gondola scene, The Doge of Venice (1889-90), which was reminiscent of Juglaris’s own famed work.
Although upon returning to France in February 1889 Benjamin-Constant did undertake major mural commissions in Paris at the Hotel De Ville (1889), the New Sorbonne, and the Opera Comique Theater (1898), as well as for the Capitole de Toulouse (1900), his mural painting experience at the time of his Boston engagement was limited, if existent at all. Thus, in the end, despite his own deft talents and training, Juglaris was not only losing ground to native-born American artists, but also being bested by more celebrated European artists imported for lucrative projects whose experience with murals could hardly match his own.
Of course, beyond the missed mural commissions at the Boston Public Library and the Frederick L. Ames mansion, an even more palpable and immediate embarrassment for Juglaris was the public snub that he received from an exhibition jury at the Boston Art Club while still teaching at its affiliated school. The jury declined to include for mounting and display his portrait of a Boston matron that he had submitted for review. Boston newspapers were full of comment. One “Art Notes” columnist remarked:
“[The public] will be surprised to discover that in the exhibition of our representative art club a large proportion of our representative artists are unrepresented; and it will probably reflect that as good as some of the art is on the walls of the gallery, larger showing of good art could be made here if, for some inscrutable reason, the absent artists did not abstain from sending in their works. Perhaps these artists do not care to run the gauntlet of the Art Club jury, that is, providing there is any necessity for their doing so. It would be curious to see an exhibition of the two hundred and odd pictures refused. We have seen one of them, a portrait by Juglaris, which was subjected to that humiliation. It is now to be viewed at the gallery of Messrs, Williams and Everett. In point of color and drawing it [a] masterly portrait in its way. Few, if any artists in New York or Boston could produce a better portrait than this is on the whole. The figure has admirable simplicity and dignity, the tone of the work is charming, and the true artist is shown throughout. That the face is not as finished as it might be would perhaps have weight with a more particular jury than some of the pictures admitted to the Art Club exhibition incontestably prove that the organization’s jury to have been. That it should have accepted so much that was worthless, and refused this portrait, with whatever shortcomings may be discovered in it, is an enigma we try in vain to solve.” [Juglaris Album]
Given Juglaris’s longstanding role with the Boston Art Club as teacher-in-residence, the exclusion of his portrait from the exhibition was particularly remarkable, even astonishing. If the exhibition’s jury process was not name-blind from the start, it raises the possibility that more than aesthetic considerations were at play. At the same time, Juglaris’s painterly style could have been very recognizable without his name being cited at all. Whether or not nationalism and attendant prejudice were actual factors in the Art Club jury’s decision, it may have been hard for Juglaris not to suspect that they were.
Of course, adding further stress to his life in roughly the same period, Juglaris was also dealing with both the Abbott Graves contretemps over alleged artistic plagiarism and the very public battle involving the Italian Consul General in New York City who stood accused of corruption. Compounding his usual fatigue from sundry art projects and overwork as a dedicated teacher, all these developments took their toll on Juglaris. Indeed, in October 1890, he was completely bedridden for four weeks. The Rhode Island School of Design paid him all the same. Yet the Boston Art Club docked his pay for missed teaching days. A disappointed Juglaris remarks in his memoirs: “It was logical and I said nothing, but I found it hard , after eight years of continual and irreproachable service!” Although Juglaris had enjoyed an extraordinary decade in Boston, the bloom was definitely fading from the rose. What he had to offer remained considerable. All the same, his future in Boston and the United States was perhaps going to require more stamina and fortitude on his part than he could summon.