Jerome Myers
| Jerome Myers | |
|---|---|
Jerome Myers ca. 1910
|
|
| Born |
March 20, 1867 Petersburg, Virginia |
| Died | June 19, 1940 (aged 73) New York, New York |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | Cooper Union, Art Students League |
| Known for | Painting, drawing, pastels, etching |
| Notable work |
|
| Spouse(s) | Ethel Myers |
Jerome Myers (March 20, 1867 – June 19, 1940) was an American artist and writer associated with the Ashcan School, particularly known for his sympathetic depictions of the urban landscape and its people. He was one of the main organizers of the 1913 Armory Show, which introduced European modernism to America.
Born in Petersburg, Virginia and raised in Philadelphia, Trenton and Baltimore, he spent his adult life in New York City. Myers worked briefly as an actor and scene painter. He then studied art for a year at Cooper Union followed by study at the Art Students League over a period of eight years where his main teacher was George de Forest Brush. In 1896 he went to Paris, but only stayed a few months, believing that his main classroom was the streets of New York's Lower East Side. His strong interest and feelings for the new immigrants resulted in over a thousand drawings, as well as paintings, etchings and watercolors that depicted their lives outside of the tenements which were their first homes in America.
In a 1923 magazine article he explained why cities were his greatest source of inspiration:
“All my life I had lived, worked and played in the poorest streets of American cities. I knew them and their population and was one of them. Others saw ugliness and degradation there, I saw poetry and beauty, so I came back to them. I took a sporting chance of saying something out of my own experience and risking whether it was worthwhile or not. That is all any artist can do.”
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.
...
Wikipedia