page_title: Jerome Myers
section_title: Later years
hierarchical_section_title: Jerome Myers / Life and career / Later years
context_page_description: Jerome Myers 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.
context_section_description: Myers won the Altman Prize for Street Shrine in 1931 and again in 1937 for City Playground. He was awarded the National Academy's Carnegie Prize in 1936 and the Isidor Medal in 1938. In 1934 the Metropolitan Museum of Art had purchased the painting Street Group from the Municipal Art Exhibition in Rockefeller Center. The New York Herald Tribune reported:
  the painting by Mr. Myers is of a group of women standing talking in a somber street, with children playing about them. Mr. Myers considers it typical of his work, and says it is the sort of scene he most enjoys to paint. "Old streets and old houses and the people who live in them," he explained. "I am trying to catch the New York that is passing," he said. "I painted that down on Delancey Street seven or eight years ago and already the scene has changed in spirit. I want to get it before it is gone."
  Twenty two years earlier, in 1912, the Metropolitan had made its first purchase of a Myers painting, The Mission Tent. The June 1913 Metropolitan Museum Bulletin wrote:
  Jerome Myers for several years has been showing New Yorkers the artistic possibilities of what is perhaps the unique part of the city's scenes. He has discovered these subjects for himself and treats them in his own way. It is never the exciting moments of street life that move him, only the daily happenings, the usual things that all may see. Boys and girls playing in the square, the crowd at a recreation pier, an organ-grinder followed by a troop of dancing children, old people whom the night freshness lures to the park-bench or the wharf, a religious festival in Little Italy—these are his favorite themes and he renders them with loving sincerity and a profound appreciation of their significance.
  Not only was the sale to the Metropolitan a great honor then, but it also provided him with enough money to move his family from their small studio into a more spacious one in the new Carnegie Hall. 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.
caption: The Tambourine. This oil painting from 1905 was one the 90 works shown in the Jerome Myers Memorial Exhibition held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1941.[9]
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