page_title: Ethel Myers
section_title: Marriage
hierarchical_section_title: Ethel Myers / Marriage, Disinheritance and Birth of Daughter / Marriage
caption_attribution_description: English: Ethel Myers &amp; Virginia Myers (daughter) portrait
context_page_description: Mae Ethel Klinck Myers better known as Ethel Myers was a New York Realist artist and sculptor strongly influenced in her work by the goals of the Ashcan School and its leader and famous teacher, Robert Henri. Her earliest subjects for pictures involved her capturing the life of the Lower East Side as well as journeying to slums in other cities such as Boston. Her greatest fame came some years later, after her marriage to New York artist Jerome Myers, when she became known for her figurative bronze statuettes and figurines "with a quite uncommon sense of humor, and with more than this, a feeling for form and movement that gives them life and conviction." "Her three powerfully expressed sculptured figurines impress this reviewer with the fact that she is worthy of a place alongside of Daumier, Meunier and Mahonri Young."
context_section_description: Ethel first met her future husband, artist Jerome Myers, in 1904.  After going to see Jerome's pictures at the Macbeth Gallery on a number of occasions, she started saving his newspaper clippings for a period of two years. His drawings and paintings of the lower East Side had been getting favorable reviews and he was widely respected by critics and artists alike, particularly Robert Henri, for the honesty and humanity of his realistic view of the immigrant populations crowded into that ghetto. It was Henri who had said,"Art cannot be separated from life...the artists who produce the most satisfactory art are in my mind those who are absorbed in the civilization in which they are living.""The poor were my people...through whom dignity of life is manifest."
  Ethel arranged to meet Jerome Myers in his studio and afterwards they visited each other a number of times in their two studios, his on East 59th Street in New York City and hers in the old Connelly Mansion, built by Tammany Hall money, overlooking the Hudson River. "Marriage was the last thing in my mind," Ethel wrote, "but in three months Jerome proposed to me. He said he didn't have any money and maybe never would have, but if I would take a chance with him he would love to marry me. I looked at him in astonishment and said, But I am engaged to be married. He calmly said, Well, think it over for a week and let me know. He had never been to my house and knew nothing about me. I thought it over for a week and decided I would marry him." 
  Jerome Myers and Ethel Klinck were married in a small church ceremony in October 1905. They began marriage in his studio on 59th Street.
caption: Ethel and Virginia (age 5)
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