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Julia Lemos was born in New York in the early 1840s but lived most of her life in
Chicago, where she died in 1923. In an autobiographical statement, she
explained that she was the daughter of Baron Eustace Wyszynski of
Warsaw, who had been exiled by the Russians after the failed insurrection of 1831, and her
mother was a cousin of President Martin Van Buren. At sixteen she married Nicolas
Lemos. At the time of the fire, she was living in the North Division with her father, her
mother, and her five children, and working for a lithography company. Her painting
presents a view of refugees gathering near Menominee and Wells, a few blocks northwest
of the southern end of Lincoln Park. Although it was painted long after Mrs. Lemos and
her family "passed through the fire," her visual recollection of the experience still captures
the excitement of the moment.
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A Visual Record 