“I was invited to return to America to paint the walls of the library in Franklin, Massachusetts, a small town a half hour from Boston, where there is an Academy of Science and Letters . . .”
Taking up residence in Turin and Florence after his 1891 departure from the United States, Juglaris remarried. Although Boston newspapers reported that Juglaris’s new wife was an Italian countess, she was actually the widow of an old friend who had served as a personal physician to the Italian liberator Giuseppe Garibaldi. However, due to his wife’s poor physical and emotional health, Juglaris’s happiness with Marzia Copello Camposoprano proved short-lived. Only six years after their marriage, he was widowed for a second time. He chose never to marry again.
In Turin and Florence Juglaris continued to pursue his vocation as an artist, regularly exhibiting works that emerged from his easel. His two decades abroad and his well-reported successes in Paris and Boston enhanced his reputation in Italy not only as a genre painter, portraitist, and muralist, but also as an art educator. Representative of such genre painting was a pair of classically garbed female figures sharing an intimate conversation on a seaside balcony. Entitled Confidenze (The Confidence), it was completed in Turin in 1899.
Meanwhile, a number of his faithful American students and friends remained in constant correspondence with him. One of them was Henry Hammond Gallison, who had studied under Juglaris at the Boston Art Club. A true polymath, Gallison was both a respected Harvard-educated physician and jurist. But he was also a talented painter, exhibiting and receiving recognition and various awards from the Salon of French Artists, the Exposition Universelle of Paris (1900), the Trans-Mississippi Exposition at Omaha (1898), and the Louisiana Purchase Exposition at St. Louis (1904).
Enjoying strong family ties with the Town of Franklin, Gallison proved influential in persuading the wealthy daughters of the local mill owner to follow the pattern of philanthropy common to that period of Massachusetts life in funding the construction of a new, purpose-built library facility. The town institution already had a legitimate claim to be “oldest public library in America,” thanks to a 1778 gift of 116 books to the local citizenry from one of the nation’s founders, Benjamin Franklin. As now grandly conceived by Gallison, the town’s free lending collection would have a building truly worthy of its history. To be known as the “Ray Memorial,” it was intended to also suitably honor the sisters’ parents, local mill owners Joseph Gordon Ray and Emily Rockwood Ray.
The capable and ingratiating Gallison offered to supervise the entire library project from start to finish. However, more than sheer altruism motivated him. On a professional level, Gallison seems to have welcomed the opportunity to collaborate with one of Boston’s more promising young architects, namely, Theodore H. Skinner of Rand & Skinner. Yet no less alluring was the prospect, afforded by the library project, of meaningfully working hand-in-hand again with his cherished teacher and mentor, Tommaso Juglaris, in together providing extensive interior decorations, especially after collaboration with more local Boston artists proved impossible due to their high remunerative demands and an apparent clash of aesthetic visions.
A Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) graduate, Theodore Skinner had emerged from an upbringing within New York’s utopian and religious perfectionist Oneida Community, known for its radically communal life and its development of notable and enduring craft industries. This undoubtedly shaped or influenced Skinner’s own professional interest in public buildings. Originally employed with the prestigious architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White, which was responsible for the Boston Public Library, Skinner remained at least an occasional architect and engineer for Oneida enterprises. Yet he ultimately became known for his design of libraries and other buildings at Mount Holyoke and Smith Colleges, as well as Columbia University, City University of New York (CUNY), and the University of Virginia. Guided by Gallison, Skinner’s designs for the Franklin Public Library helped anchor his budding career.
Soon selected by Gallison and Skinner as a building contractor for the Franklin project was Frank B. Gilbreth, also well-known as a leading efficiency expert and the author of a popular fictionalized tale about his own family, Cheaper By the Dozen. As a point of pride, Gilbreth was later to boldly cite his work at the Franklin Public Library in full page advertisements highlighting his professional services. [The American Architect and Building News, February 17, 1907, xiii]
For interior decorations Gallison, whose painting Rising Mists had been acquired in 1903 by the Galleria Nazionale d’ Arte Moderne e Contemporanea in Rome, planned to execute a series of comparable murals and paintings all his own. In fact, he created a four-panel mural cycle for the new library’s Delivery Room depicting deserts of the world, plus another four massive, gold-framed landscape paintings for the library’s front memorial hall entrance and its adjoining anteroom, respectively entitled Morning, The City, The Past, and Dream City. The first three of these ample paintings have remained in place within the library’s precincts. However, at some unknown point Dream City, “representing an eastern city upon a cliff overhanging the sea, enveloped in early morning light, the sun breaking through the clouds and illuminating the spires and domes of the city and the shore with a rosy light,” inexplicably disappeared from the library collection. As recounted by sleuthing journalist Heather McCarron, Dream City has since remained lost without clues as to its fate. [Heather McCarron, “Mystery at the Franklin Library,” March 17, 2022]
In keeping with Skinner’s classical Greek temple scheme, as well as to complement his own work, Gallison successfully prevailed upon Juglaris to return to America to paint a richly bodied canvas mural cycle for the library’s woodwork-columned Reading Room. Later, Gallison called upon Juglaris to paint an additional five friezes to be installed in the front memorial hall entrance above his own paintings, offering a tangible, visual affirmation of their longstanding relationship as artists together.
Dividing his time between Turin and Boston from 1902 to 1905, Juglaris recognized in Gallison’s invitation a splendid opportunity to demonstrate his talents for truly monumental painting that he never had a chance to display in the heart of Boston. He felt especially competitive with those artists who had been tapped to decorate the new Boston Public Library at Copley Square. As Juglaris specifically confided in his memoirs: “[At] the Boston library there were decorations by Puvis de Chavannes, by [John Singer] Sargent, by [William Merritt] Chase [sic] and others but…I must do better, especially more pleasing decorations.” Although Juglaris was mistaken about Chase’s decorative presence at the Boston Public Library, the contributions of Puvis de Chavannes and Sargent were being much touted by turn-of-the-century publications. As it turned out, however, Sargent, who was still laboring on his Triumph of Religion murals at the time that Juglaris commenced work at the Franklin Library, never did, in fact, finish what he had planned from the start. Upon his passing in April 1925, two decades later and only three months after Juglaris’s own death, Sargent’s keynote panel, intended to cap off his entire Boston Public Library mural schema, remained undone.
As his own work on the Reading Room murals got fully underway in 1902-03, Juglaris divided his time between Franklin, Providence, Rhode Island, and Annisquam, Massachusetts. The latter was an artist’s colony on Massachusetts Bay where Gallison kept a summer place and expressly built a separate studio with sufficient space and all requisite amenities for the large decorative painting projects that he and Juglaris were undertaking. In Annisquam Juglaris stayed at a local resort hotel and wrote letters to a friend, the Italian archaeologist and literary figure Edoardo Calandra. Preserved in the archives of the Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the letters marvel at the progress the United States has made in the decade of his absence. Juglaris forecasts a brilliant future for the still-young nation:
“Imagine, when I left Boston elven years ago, it had five hundred thousand inhabitants. It now has more than a million. Elevated and underground railroads, immense stations, splendid streets and roads with huge palaces, ugly but amazing buildings twenty or twenty-five stories high, steam and electric elevators, omnibuses, streetcars, vehicles of every kind. A frenetic, exciting coming and going. In short, it is a country that will dominate the universe and educate the world. [It is] impossible to describe the progress of this great people.”
It took three years for Juglaris to finish his murals and friezes, respectively called Grecian Festival and The Hours. Combined, they constituted one of the largest mural projects at that time found in the United States. Juglaris’s passion and sense of pride in completing this bravura master-work is revealed in the self-portrait found in the southeast corner of the Reading Room where he depicted himself observing for perpetuity the broad sweep of the great festival. In a surprisingly modern move, a copyright application was filed on September 30, 1904 for the Grecian Festival murals, the Memorial Entrance Hall friezes, and other art already in place throughout the Franklin Library building. Four days later, on October 4, 1904, the library was officially dedicated and opened for public service.
As Juglaris’s murals and friezes reached completion and word of their magnitude spread, public interest was piqued, generating extensive newspaper coverage. One newspaper predicted that Juglaris’s murals would make the Franklin Public Library a “Mecca for art lovers.” [Juglaris Album] Although the excitement faded after the dedication of the library, Juglaris’s work continued to be admired by those who found their way to Franklin, including tourists following a Baedeker’s guidebook citing the murals. One admirer was former American President and future Supreme Court Chief Justice William Howard Taft who used to summer in boyhood days with his father’s family in nearby Mendon and Uxbridge, Massachusetts. Delivering a commencement address at Dean Academy (now Dean College) in June 1916, the ex-president ventured across the street to the new Franklin Public Library building. Already exposed to Juglaris’s talents, thanks to his previous guest stay at the Barnes-Hiscock mansion in Syracuse, New York where the muralist had completed vibrant dining room friezes, Taft had only high praise for the new library as an aesthetic ensemble with its Memorial Entrance Hall and Reading Room so richly decorated by Juglaris.