Tragic Losses

“I quite liked that young woman, nothing about her was affected. She received and treated people with such simplicity that finding oneself in her company was a real pleasure . . . I had all that was necessary to maintain a wife decorously and I decided to break my celibacy.”

Although Juglaris was deeply dedicated to his calling as an artist, his flourishing career made him confident that he could at last support a wife and family. Romance blossomed when he met Katie (or “Catterina”) Brooks. Against the wishes of Katie’s mother who loudly disparaged Juglaris, declaring that “Italians are all assassins and brigands,” the couple was married on July 5, 1883. It was a simple ceremony at home with only family members and a few friends present, including Henry Hammond Gallison, Donald MacDonald and Frank Cowles, the head of Cowles Art School. The minister from nearby People’s Church, later the site of one of Juglaris’s stained glass commissions, officiated.

Grave of Katie and Marianne Juglaris,
Forest Hills Cemetery, Boston

As newlyweds Tommaso and Katie Juglaris continued to have trouble with her family. Yet they enjoyed a happy life together, beginning with their honeymoon trip to New York. They also took time for a more extended mid-August excursion to Nova Scotia, traveling north by boat and returning to Boston by train. In the manner of his contemporaneous fellow artist Henry Bacon, who became known for sketched and painted renderings of shipside scenes, Juglaris later commemorated this happy sojourn with his wife by his own painting, Mid-Ocean.

Drawing of a Sleeping Infantby Juglaris — Sleeping Infant, a drawing by Juglaris

Tragically, however, Katie died of septic infection nineteen days after giving birth to a daughter by caesarian section on May 10, 1884. Moreover, left in the care of the Children’s Hospital, Juglaris’s newborn daughter, Marianne, also succumbed to fatal illness just a couple of months afterwards on August 4. A grief-stricken Juglaris was in Italy at the time, visiting his one surviving brother in Florence. When he returned to the United States, departing as verified by ship log from Liverpool aboard the HMS City of Chester on September 2 in the company of his student and colleague Edward Wilbur Hamilton, Juglaris discovered that he was now a childless father, as well as a widower. Juglaris’s double loss undoubtedly weakened his ties to the United States where he had begun family life with such hope.

In the Face of Grief. . .

La Zingarella or The Gypsy Girl, painting by Juglaris

No known photographs of Katie Juglaris or the infant Marianne Juglaris exist. The painting, Mid-Ocean, sometimes alternatively entitled Coming Home, is a retrospective snapshot of their married life together. Finished and exhibited after Katie’s tragic death, it depicts the artist solicitously attending his wife, very possibly pregnant, amid the lounge chairs on ship deck. (“Soldiers’ Home Carnival,” April 25, 1885, 2, and “The Fine Arts: Thomas Juglaris’s Studio Exhibition,” March 31, 1890, 6, Boston Evening Telegraph) Perhaps as a talisman of Katie Juglaris’s expectancy, a mother seated in an adjoining deck chair cradles her young child. Mid-Ocean was deeply meaningful to Juglaris. In further remembrance of Katie, he subsequently had the original painting lithographically reproduced for wider circulation.

Katie Juglaris is also believed to have been the inspiration and model for a painting which Juglaris entitled La Zingarella or Gypsy Girl. Owned by the Familiar Moncalereisa cultural heritage organization in Moncalieri, Italy, La Zingarella prominently displays the same distinctive T-J monogram with which Juglaris signed his Michigan Capitol muses.

Self-Portrait by Juglaris

At the time of his wife’s death, Juglaris commissioned Cesare Biscarra of Turin to sculpt a white marble medallion bas relief for her tomb at the Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston. The bas relief is a carved portrait of Katie Juglaris in profile. The tomb also served as a grave site for young Marianne Juglaris, who was buried at her mother’s side. Juglaris may have sketched his infant daughter in her cradle before departing on his trip to Europe to visit his brother in Turin. Like Juglaris’s memoir, the drawing of an infant was found among the artist’s papers and collected art in northern Italy.

Juglaris was devastated by the loss of his wife and child. In his memoir, he notes that following their burial at Forest Hills, he never ventured to the cemetery again. In a somber self-portrait painted a year afterwards (1885) sorrow and grief seem etched in Juglaris’s face.