Early years Born in Petersburg, Virginia, Jerome Myers was one of Abram and Julia Hillman Myers' five children. His brother,
Gustavus Myers, later became a prominent muckraking journalist, socialist activist, and historian. As their father was often absent, the Myers children were raised by their mother and eventually lived in Trenton, New Jersey, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. From time to time, the siblings were placed in foster homes when their mother was ill. Given these family hardships, Myers began taking odd jobs at a young age, living in Baltimore, Maryland, before moving on to New York City. Arriving in Manhattan in 1886 at the age of nineteen, Myers worked for several years as a scene painter and later for the
Moss Engraving Company, where he reproduced photographic negatives. During this time he began attending evening art classes at Cooper Union and the Art Students League. Even then, his interest in urban subjects was evident. Myers' earliest oil painting,
Backyard (1888), depicting a clotheslines silhouetted against distant tenements, is today thought to be one of the first paintings exemplifying Ashcan School subject matter in America. Similarly, around 1893, after sketching a canal boat during a day trip along the
Morris and Essex Canal, Myers made his first sale to the woman who lived on the boat. The price was two dollars.
Becoming a professional artist In 1895, Myers found work in the art department of the
New York Tribune. With savings of two hundred and fifty dollars from this job, he traveled to Paris in 1896. Upon his return to New York City, with only twenty dollars left, he rented, for seven dollars a month, a studio at 232 West 14th Street in a former five-story mansion, "equipped with a skylight and converted to the use of artists." There, his next door neighbor was Edward Adam Kramer, a painter just one year older than Myers himself. While Myers' art training had been limited to short stints at New York's Cooper Union and the Art Students League, Kramer had acquired his education in the European art centers of Munich, Berlin, and Paris. It was Kramer who ushered Myers into the world of the professional artist. One day, when the art dealer William Macbeth arrived at Kramer's studio to view work, Kramer directed him to Myers' studio as well. Macbeth purchased two small paintings of his early New York street scenes from Myers on the spot, and simultaneously recommended that he bring additional work to the gallery. Macbeth thought highly of these two paintings and, taking them to his gallery, soon sold one to the banker,
James Speyer. As an early critic for the
New York Globe stated: "Myers' reputation dates from that purchase." Macbeth also suggested that Myers relinquish drawing in pencil and pastel and turn to oils. In the years following 1902, Myers sold work through the Macbeth Gallery and exhibited in group shows at other venues. In March and April 1903, when the Colonial Club of New York held its annual art show,
Exhibition of Paintings Mainly by New Men, among the twenty artists included were
Robert Henri,
John French Sloan, and Myers, showing their works together for the first time.
Summer in Manhattan For Jerome Myers, summer in
Manhattan provided particular opportunities for depicting immigrant life in the urban landscape. The hot weather brought the tenement dwellers out into the streets and parks of the city. By July 1906, Myers' reputation as an artist depicting the life of the people on the
Lower East Side was such that a
New York Times reporter was assigned to him, beginning at five o'clock one morning, to observe the artist capturing likenesses of the adults at work and children at play. To walk through the East Side with Myers, the reporter noted, "turning off here and there to glance at some particular house or group of people, ... [was] to receive an impression of a joyous life lived in the open air for much the same reason as people live in that fashion in Europe—because their homes are not as comfortable as the streets." Individual responses to Myers' presence, however, were grounded in cultural differences. While the residents of Italian neighborhoods viewed the artist and his activities with excitement and curiosity, those of the Jewish Quarter, whose traditions often forbade the production of representational images, protested by moving away from the artist's range of vision. Over the years, despite moving around to various studios, he always came back to Carnegie as his real home. Myers died in his Carnegie studio on June 19, 1940, after a series of illnesses complicated by an injury sustained from a fall. He was 73. Earlier that year, he had published his autobiography,
Artist In Manhattan. In their obituary for Myers, published in July 1940,
The Art Digest wrote: Though Myers later achieved wide honors—he was elected to the Academy and awarded such important prizes as the Altman, the Carnegie and the Isidor Medal—he suffered from neglect in recent years. Forgotten, for the most part, were Myers' distinctive contributions to our native art and the battles he has fought for art freedom. In April–May 1941 the
Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City held the
Jerome Myers Memorial Exhibition with over 90 of his paintings, drawings and etchings lent by museums throughout the United States as well as private collectors. The oil paintings exhibited ranged from his 1905
The Tambourine to a self-portrait completed in 1939, the year before his death. Myers was survived by his wife and fellow artist
Ethel Myers whom he had married in 1905 and their daughter, the dancer
Virginia Myers. Following her husband's death Ethel devoted much of her time to furthering his artistic reputation. She lectured on his work throughout the United States, under the auspices of the
American Federation of Arts from 1941 to 1943 and maintained the Jerome Myers Memorial Gallery in New York City for a number of years. ==Gallery==