Eugenia was famous from an early age for her beauty; French nuns supervised the girl's education. The young woman added to her silver-mine inheritance by marrying José Tomás Errázuriz; a young and wealthy landscape painter from a well-known winemaking family. Her first years of marriage were spent at Panquehue Errázuriz, the family's wine estate, where she had a son who died soon after birth; the couple eventually had three surviving children: Maximiliano, Carmen, and María. She soon convinced her husband to move to Paris in 1882, where his brother-in-law Ramón Subercaseaux Vicuña was the Chilean consul and was married to Amalia Errázuriz, a beauty who had been painted by John Singer Sargent.