“I finished the portrait in seven sittings of two hours each. Mrs. Cleveland posed like a professional model. It was found by most to be a strong resemblance . . . ”
For all the attention and notoriety that Tommaso Juglaris garnered for his nude painting of Mlle. Yvonne, he was also appreciated as an artist of more chaste work. Indeed, Juglaris’s reputation was sufficient to attract the notice of the New York-based art and culture maven Helena de Kay Gilder. A founder of both the Art Students’s League and the Society of American Artists in New York City, Helena de Kay was also the sister of the New York Times art critic Charles de Kay. Yet her influence did not stop there. De Kay’s husband was the noted and politically astute Scribner’s editor Richard Gilder. In turn, the couple were close personal friends of President Grover Cleveland and his wife, Frances Folsom Cleveland. Ultimately, the well-networked Helena de Kay, encouraged by husband Richard, recruited Juglaris to paint Frances Cleveland’s portrait.
Until the 21st century, Grover Cleveland was the only American president to serve two non-consecutive terms in office, 1885-89 and 1993-96. He wed Frances Folsom in the Blue Room of the White House in June 1886. Due to the age difference between bride and groom and the president’s previous role as a close, longstanding friend to the Folsom family, the marriage was slightly controversial. While Grover Cleveland was already 49, Frances was merely 21 years of age, making her the youngest First Lady in U.S. history.
A fresh face, appealing widely to the women of her day, Frances was the object of considerable newspaper and magazine attention. She became a much-photographed fashion icon. Hundreds of photos of Frances Cleveland survive. Without permission, her image was exploited for commercial advertising—a cause for pique for both the President and First Lady. In the face of all this, the Gilders, particularly Richard, were eager to see Frances Cleveland immortalized in a finer way.
As Annette Dunalp, Frances Cleveland’s biographer, has noted, Richard Gilder wrote the First Lady on June 29, 1887, encouraging her to have amore suitable portrait done. Initially, he proposed that the “American-European” painter John Singer Sargent be solicited for such a commission. On second thought, however, Gilder recommended the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens for the suggested portrait. As Gilder explained, Saint-Gaudens “is one of the best [sculptors] now living. Besides his public work—the Farragut in New York--the forthcoming Col. Shaw in Boston and Lincoln in Chicago, etc., he has made some most exquisite [smaller] portraits in the style I speak of.” Gilder speculated that in lieu of a sculpted work, Saint-Gaudens might be willing to paint a more conventional oil portrait. The demands upon the First Lady would not be onerous. In Gilder’s estimate, it would only necessitate “sittings during two weeks in Washington or wherever you prefer.” [Annette Dunlap, Frank, 41-47]
In fact, soon after Gilder’s letter, his wife, Helena de Kay, arranged for Augustus Saint-Gaudens to begin a medallion bas relief portrait of the First Lady. As recorded in a vintage photograph, Frances Cleveland sat for the sculptor’s necessary sketches in Helena de Kay’s Marion, Massachusetts studio near Cape Cod. But it took five years for Saint-Gaudens to complete a rather preliminary seventeen-inch plaster portrait and ten years more (1902) to finally cast a five-inch bas relief in bronze. In the interregnum, specifically in 1890, Helena de Kay took the initiative on behalf of the Clevelands to secure the services of Juglaris for an oil portrait.
Exactly how Helena de Kay first became acquainted with Juglaris remains a mystery. Yet she did have longstanding ties with the New York Academy of Design where she had earlier studied and Juglaris periodically served as an art juror. Moreover, Juglaris was among the artists already profiled in Scribner’s Cyclopia of Painters and Paintings, published by Richard Gilder’s employer.
One of the leading artists for Scriber’s was the Hungarian-born Jacques Reich whom Juglaris counted as a colleague and friend. Reich also served as art director or coordinator for Appletons’s Cyclopaedia: of American Biography with which Juglaris may have assisted. In his memoirs Juglaris recalls a happy rendezvous with Reich in February 1889. As Juglaris elaborates:
“Reich had come to see me and with him we visited the illustrious men living in Boston. We saw Oliver Wendell Holmes, [John Boyle] O’Reilly, [John Greenleaf] Whittier, [the Edward B. and George H.] Butlers, and [James Russell] Lowell. They received us well and were extremely nice. Reich was to do some portraits of all the illustrious men, historians, ancient and modern, of the United States. My biography was also among the artists.”
Those visited by Reich and Juglaris included four renowned poets and two leading Boston retailers who helped innovate Boston’s “Five and Dime” stores.
Probably at the behest of Reich and on the basis of available photographs of the “Bride of the White House,” Juglaris appears to have executed a sketch of Frances Cleveland for the 1889 edition of Appletons’s Cyclopedia: a half-turned monogram, similar to recombined “TJ” initial displayed on other works—is noticeable in the design of the First Lady’s right upper bodice. If Juglaris was indeed the sketching artist, it could only have furthered his prospects for securing the Cleveland portrait commission. Of course, in the end, as Juglaris’s memoirs acknowledge, his Italian compatriot and New England Conservatory colleague Augusto Rotoli helped clinch the deal. Coincidentally meeting Frances Cleveland in early summer 1890 while vacationing in Marion, Massachusetts within the orbit of the Gilder Circle, Rotoli was able to put in a good word for Juglaris in response to First Lady’s own curious and earnest inquiry about him.
During this time when Grover and Frances Cleveland were temporarily out of office and living in New York City, awaiting a successful reelection bid, they spent much of their summers close to the Gilders along the southern Massachusetts seacoast. Before purchasing a large house of their own on Buzzard’s Bay known as “Gray Gables,” they rented a “cottage” with close access to the Atlantic waters where the President liked to fish. Twice over, as Frances Cleveland’s portrait sittings got underway, the couple invited Juglaris to share lunch with them.
Like Augustus Saint-Gaudens three years earlier, Juglaris made use of Helena de Kay’s studio “in the woods” to sketch and paint the First Lady’s portrait. He devoted two weeks to preliminary drawings and then returned to complete his work in oil on canvas. “I finished the portrait,” he explains in his memoirs, “in seven sittings of two hours each. Mrs. Cleveland posed like a professional model.” According to Juglaris, it “was found by most to be a strong resemblance and I was paid 500 dollars”—a handsome sum approaching $13,000 or more by present-day accounting. Juglaris was thoroughly charmed by his young subject whom he quaintly but respectfully addressed in his memoirs as the “lovely Mrs. President.” An expansive Grover Cleveland, who favored immigration, prophesized that Juglaris had a brilliant future ahead of him in America.
Subsequently, a couple of other artists were called upon to execute portraits of Frances Cleveland. In 1891 the New York socialite Peter Marie commissioned the French miniaturist Fernard Paillet to paint a locket-sized portrait of Frances Cleveland for his personal collection of Gilded Age beauties. Thereafter, in 1899 on a grander scale favoring an Art Nouveau style, the Swedish painter Anders Leonard Zorn unveiled the former First Lady portrayed on canvas in a white, sleeveless, strapless gown, tres decollecte. Now part of the National Portrait Gallery collection in Washington, D.C., Zorn’s work has come to be the best-known of all renderings. Nevertheless, Juglaris can still be credited with Mrs. Cleveland’s first commissioned oil portrait.
Unfortunately, the fate of Juglaris’s preliminary drawings and portrait are not known. However, like the Juglaris’s muses at the Michigan State Capitol which were not recognized as his work for more than a hundred years, his Frances Cleveland portrait may well be “buried” in plain sight, awaiting rediscovery.