Jerome Myers: the Ash Can Artist of the Lower East Side

By Robert L. Gambone

The Eight (Ash Can School), artists who joined ranks in 1908 to challenge the conservative dominance of the National Academy, does not count Jerome Myers among its number. Yet the pioneering work done by Myers places him in the forefront of contemporary realist artists. His focused concentration depicting the environment and inhabitants of New York Citys Lower East Side immigrant neighborhood catapults Jerome Myers into the forefront of artists who boldly sought out expressions of contemporary life. Myerss work allows us to understand these immigrant neighborhoods in a way that would not be possible today if his art did not exist. This book examines Myerss biography and art in detail, establishing not only his preeminant claim to a position at the forefront of the Eight, but also his role as artist-historian of a bygone neighborhood and the positive life of immigrants who lived there.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 9, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524563493

Robert L. Gambone

Robert L. Gambone received his PhD in art history from the University of Minnesota and has taught at various universities, including the University of Minnesota. He has served as curator of American art at the Weisman Art Museum and at the Brauer Museum of Art. He is the author of several books on American art including Life on the Press: the Popular Art and Illustrations of George Benjamin Luks, and Lusty Luks: the Art, Life, and Times of George Benjamin Luks. He is a contributing author to John Steuart Curry: Inventing the Middle West. He has also authored museum catalogs including Marsden Hartley Pastels: The Ione and Hudson Walker Collection, Howard Cook: From Drawings to Frescoes, and Abraham Walkowitz.

Book preview

Copyright © 2017 by Robert L. Gambone. 743791

Library of Congress Control Number:   2016919525

ISBN:   Softcover     978-1-5245-6350-9

             Hardcover   978-1-5245-6351-6

             EBook         978-1-5245-6349-3

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 02/10/2017

Xlibris

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

Contents

ABOUT THE BOOK

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

DEDICATION

PREFACE

Chapter One

THE FORMATIVE YEARS

Chapter Two

PARIS AND BACK

Chapter Three

AN ASH CAN ARTIST BEFORE THE EIGHT

Chapter Four

TRIUMPHS AND TRIBULATIONS

Chapter Five

THE ARMORY SHOW, WAR AND ITS AFTERMATH

Chapter Six

ARTIST AND AUTHOR

Chapter Seven

THE ROARING TWENTIES

Chapter Eight

TRANSITIONS

Chapter Nine

THE FINAL CHAPTER

ENDNOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ABOUT THE BOOK

The Eight (Ash Can School), artists who joined ranks in 1908 to challenge the conservative dominance of the National Academy, does not count Jerome Myers among its number. Yet the pioneering work done by Myers places him in the forefront of contemporary realist artists. His focused concentration depicting the environment and inhabitants of New York City’s Lower East Side immigrant neighborhood catapults Jerome Myers into the forefront of artists who boldly sought out expressions of contemporary life. Myers’ work allows us to understand these immigrant neighborhoods in a way that would not be possible today if his art did not exist. This book examines Myers’ biography and art in detail, establishing not only his preeminant claim to a position at the forefront of the Eight, but also his role as artist-historian of a bygone neighborhood and the positive life of immigrants who lived there.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robert L. Gambone received his Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Minnesota. He has taught at various colleges including the University of Minnesota, St. Catherine University in St. Paul, Minnesota, and at St. John’s University, Collegeville, Minnesota. He has held various museum posts, including serving as Curator of American Art at the Weisman Art Museum, the University of Minnesota and as Director and Curator at the Brauer Museum of Art, Valparaiso University, Indiana. He is the author of several books on American art including Art and Popular Religion In Evangelical America, 1915-1940; Life on the Press: the Popular Art and Illustrations of George Benjamin Luks; and Lusty Luks, the Art, Life and Times of George Benjamin Luks. He is a contributing author to Thomas Hart Benton: Artist, Writer and Intellectual; John Steuart Curry: Inventing the Middle West; and Searching for America: Essays on Art and Architecture. He has also authored various museum exhibition catalogs, including Marsden Hartley Pastels: The Ione and Hudson Walker Collection; Howard Cook: From Drawings to Frescoes; and Abraham Walkowitz.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, I should like to thank Barry Downes for providing a wealth of information, including materials on the Myers family, family photographs, and access to the Jerome Myers estate photographs without which this book could not have been written. His unfailing generosity of time, willingness to engage in long-distance phone conversations, and support for this book are gratefully appreciated. Helene Taube Downes has been generous in devoting time to photograph works in the Jerome Myers estate. Jerome Myers did not copyright his works, so many remain in the public domain. I should like to thank the estate for making their vast photo archive of Myers’ works available to me. I should also like to thank the staff of the Delaware Art Museum for allowing me access to the Jerome Myers Papers housed there. These first hand documents, including important letters and rare exhibition catalogs, as well as a treasure trove of news clippings were both essential and highly useful to this project. The Archives of American Art microfilm sources were instrumental in filling in many gaps, and I should also like to thank the staff of the Stillwater, Minnesota Public Library for their assistance in procuring this material as well as countless books, pamphlets and catalogs through inter-library loans. Many galleries, museums and individual collectors of Myers’ art responded generously to my request for images and information, and while too numerous to individually mention here, I am grateful to them all. I would, however, like to thank Ken Ratner for his support and friendship throughout this project. And finally to Jim, whose support was and is vital and without whom nothing would have been accomplished.

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to

Nancy De Vita Gambone

Whose own mother, Anna Gigante De Vita, arrived at Ellis Island over a century ago to begin a new life in America. Ricordo tutta la storia e non la scorderò mai.

Front cover: Jerome Myers, Self-Portrait in Feathered Hat, c. 1927, oil on canvas, Jerome Myers estate.

Rear cover: Jerome Myers, Jerome in Tam, undated, charcoal on paper, Jerome Myers Estate

PREFACE

The Eight, also known as the Ash Can School, an intrepid group of erstwhile newspaper illustrators turned artists who joined ranks in February 1908 to exhibit at the Macbeth Gallery in New York City, ushering in a new era in American art, does not count Jerome Myers among their number.¹ Still, the pioneering work done by Myers must place him at the forefront of contemporary realist artists practicing in the United States around the turn of the twentieth century. Myers’ unflagging focus upon the lower East Side gives him preeminent claim to be deemed an Ash Can artist without equal. In fact, Myers’ first solo exhibition-also held at the Macbeth Gallery-actually preceded that of The Eight by one full month. His focused concentration upon depicting the environment and inhabitants of New York City’s lower East Side immigrant neighborhoods-an attentiveness only matched to a less comprehensive and incomplete degree by the paintings of George Luks (1867-1933) or the art of John Sloan (1871-1951)-catapults Jerome Myers into the forefront of artists who boldly sought out expressions of contemporary life as their prime concern.² How, then, explain why Myers’ name and reputation have become relegated to a seemingly secondary status relative to that of the vaunted Eight? Or, put another way, if The Eight, the Ash Can School, is about depicting life as lived in New York at the turn of the last century with an emphasis upon ordinary, everyday, nitty-gritty reality, then why is Myers’ not counted among this number?

Perhaps the answer to this question may lie in an art-historical interpretation that has now assumed near-canonical status and so is not so easily expunged. In his epic recounting of the life and career of Robert Henri (1865-1929) and his circle, William Innes Homer opined that Henri deliberately excluded Myers from exhibiting with The Eight because he deemed Myers’ work too sentimental,³ a pejorative barb that, if accurate, would preclude any possibility of the two artists reconciling to exhibit together subsequent to 1908. The canard of sentimentality was further reinforced and propagated by Bennard Perlman who stated in his book The Immortal Eight that Myers was himself a realist painter, but of the sentimental variety….his particular brand of Realism transformed the misery of the beleaguered masses into poetry and beauty. The street urchins of George Luks were made to appear more respectable in Myers’ canvases, where they constantly emerged dressed in their Sunday best.⁴

But, in fact, Myers and various members of The Eight did exhibit together on several occasions following the 1908 Macbeth Gallery show. And the notion of being sentimental is further undermined by John Sloan who noted in his diary, Jerome Myers would and should have been a member [of The Eight]. But he was too much Henri’s age to adopt the position of disciple which Henri demanded from his friends.⁵ The picture that emerges, then, would seem to be one wherein Henri’s ego rather than any real or perceived inferiority in the work of Jerome Myers lay at the root of the latter artist’s exclusion from The Eight. And while it is true that Myers had just concluded a solo show and so his exclusion in the subsequent exhibition of The Eight would seem logical, Sloan’s comment further reveals why Myers would remain somewhat distant from Henri’s circle despite Myers’ continued friendship with Sloan and his participation in subsequent exhibitions where Henri also showed work.

Whether Myers’ exclusion was a deliberate act on the part of Henri or arose out of a desire to avoid a repetition of recently exhibited art, the question remains as to Myers’ ultimate place as an Ash Can School artist. Similar questions might be posed about other artists such as George Bellows (1882-1925) or Edward Hopper (1882-1967), whose early works are clearly influenced by the aesthetics propounded by The Eight but who are not officially counted among their number either. But while Bellows or Hopper belonged to a younger generation of painters than Henri, and thus rightly can be seen as belonging to the wider circle of Ash Can School artists, the same was not true for Myers who was a mere two years younger than Henri. So the question persists: how do we understand the context of Jerome Myers’ work and does his work have a rightful claim to be considered Ash Can School rather than a follower of, circle of, associate of, or some similar derivative nomination? Should the term The Eight, which is founded on a mere chronological technicality that saw Myers debuting at the Macbeth Gallery one month before the other members of that group, be expanded to include Myers’ name?

Thanks to Jerome Myers himself, scholars and researchers have a preeminent resource for gauging Myers’ contribution in the form of his profusely illustrated autobiography, Artist in Manhattan, published in 1940, the year of Myers’ death, by the American Artists Group. This account enables us not only to reconstruct the parameters of Myers’ life and career but further helps us gauge what Myers thought of his work, his place in the art world, including the major issues of the day and his reflections on the art and contribution of his peers. It offers an invaluable account without which much information and detail would be lost. In the seventy-five intervening years since its publication, much has changed, both in America and in the American art scene, and scholarly opinion as to the contribution and place of The Eight has waxed and waned accordingly. It would not be for another thirty-one years-1971-that the first serious re-evaluation of Myers’ art occurred when Grant Holcomb III wrote a master’s thesis on the subject. As with many masters’ theses, this work presents a fine effort by a graduate student but is necessarily limited as to the extent of the research. A follow-up article by Holcomb for the American Art Journal in 1977 fills in some gaps but repeats much information found in the earlier study without offering a sufficiently satisfying analysis for the unique importance of Myers and the reasons for why the meaning and parameters of The Eight need to be reconsidered. The diverse exhibition catalogs produced since then, both those including Myers along with other artists or focused upon solo presentations of his work, add few new insights. While acknowledging all these various sources and grateful for their contributions, the seventy-fifth anniversary of Myers’ death and the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of his birth present a fresh opportunity for a major re-evaluation of Jerome Myers’ work.

In fact, this book will demonstrate that the extensive and focused career spanning decades that Jerome Myers spent recording the East Side give him a rightful claim to be called the greatest American artist of the lower East Side. He grasped the East Side as a place of joy, opportunity, and hope, especially in its children, quite a diametrically opposed view from that of propagandist reformers in the mold of Jacob Riis whose staged photographs present quite a different picture. Because he lived in the East Side and frequented its streets he knew the children to be full of joy, well-dressed on public occasions when their proud parents brought them to Italian feste, Yiddish schuls, or presented them at public schools where the opportunity to gain and education and become successful was especially appreciated and represents yet another untold success story about this neighborhood. He knew its parks and playgrounds as no other artist did. And he understood that as the decades passed, the character of the East Side changed as well. In these respects Jerome Myers’ paintings, while artfully composed and artistically arranged, nevertheless, represent a vitally important, keenly observed, unique historical record of an immigrant neighborhood and the urban immigrant experience.

The following study, then, aims to illuminate the many and varied ways the work of Jerome Myers sits squarely at the heart of the Ash Can School tradition and will elucidate reasons why the artificial art historical construct termed The Eight must be reconsidered or at the very least significantly nuanced. Even more so than other recognized members of The Eight, the work of Jerome Myers demonstrates an unflagging commitment to and a unique-almost reportorial-depiction of immigrant life on the lower East Side, a life Myers also lived and shared intimately with his subjects. This is a claim that can be made by no other Ash Can School artist. The somewhat artificial compartmentalization and arbitrary categorization of individuals or groups of artists that historians of art sometimes devise in order to clarify and explain trends in art can slight the more complex, fluid realities of art history and the personalities this history encompasses.⁶ The study that follows offers a reexamination and reappraisal of the art, life and career of Jerome Myers. In so doing, it will demonstrate that in any discussion of the Ash Can School or The Eight, the name and life work of Jerome Myers must shine brightly among its stars. And to that end we turn now to examine in-depth the art of Jerome Myers.

Chapter One

THE FORMATIVE YEARS

The rise of Jerome Myers to a position of prominence in the art world of New York City during the opening decades of the twentieth century might seem surprising given his humble origins, fragmented family life and economic struggles. Yet a closer look at his family history also reveals a rich and complex past, one auguring well for an ambitious and aspiring young painter.

Born in Petersburg, Virginia on the twentieth of March 1867, the son of Abram and Julia Hillman Myers, Jerome grew up in a south recently devastated by the plague of Civil War. The city of Petersburg played a pivotal roll in the waning years of that horrendous conflict. The second largest city in the Commonwealth of Virginia, Petersburg held a strategic importance for the Confederacy. Situated at the head of navigation on the Appomattox River, and a mere twenty three miles south of Richmond, Petersburg’s port and the convergence of five major rail lines there made the city a leading transportation and vital supply hub for the Confederate capital.⁷ Unlike many other southern metropolises of that era, Petersburg also boasted a vibrant economy centered around tobacco factories, cotton mills, and several iron foundries and flour mills; but following the outbreak of hostilities, this economy was converted to the war effort: tobacco factories were expropriated for military hospitals and powder mills, lead works, ropewalks and a wagon repair shop soon supplanted peacetime industries.⁸ With most men absent as soldiers, inflation rampant and refugees streaming into the town from Norfolk crime and street gangs increased the desperation of local citizens to the point that martial law was declared in the city by March of 1862.⁹ In the spring of 1864 Union General Ulysses S. Grant began a relentless campaign to capture the city and cut vital supply lines to Richmond resulting in a siege lasting 292 days; the city capitulated on the morning of April third 1865 forcing Confederate General Robert E. Lee to abandon Richmond and retreat southwest toward Appomattox where he surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House on April ninth.¹⁰

It was against this background that the three older Myers boys, Harry, Gustavus and Bernhard, together with their mother struggled to survive. There is no record that their father, Abram Myers, fought in the war but as a relatively young man of at most thirty-five or forty years old he certainly would have been of draft age. Rather, it seems likely that the elder Myers chose to sit out the war far away in the gold mines of California and later in Alaska returning only intermittently to Virginia.¹¹ In fact, Abram Myers had left his family as early as 1849-1850 soon after the discovery of gold in California became public [fig. 1].

Image1.tif

Fig. 1. Photograph of Abram Myers in prospector’s gear, Alaska Territory. Photo image courtesy of the Jerome Myers Estate.

Family lore held that he was given the adopted name Francesco [sic] in California and that his father indeed struck it rich at the storied Cleopatra Mine, acquiring the deed to that property only to subsequently lose it amid the general lawlessness, violence and vigilantism then prevailing in the territory.¹² Whether or not Abram Myers ever discovered gold, he almost certainly returned home from time to time since there were several children younger than Jerome in the family with Jerome, himself, being born only after the close of hostilities in 1867. Later in life Jerome Myers recalled his father as at home after long intervals….I was about ten, and my father had been away for five years. He came home carrying a fish on a string; in a casual way he asked about mother, adding that we would have fish for supper.¹³ Several of Jerome’s contemporaries have corroborated the desperate economic circumstances of the Myers’ family at the time of the artist’s birth. His close friend and fellow artist, Guy Pène du Bois, noted that Myers had run away from a home left nearly destitute by a father who appeared there at rare intervals,¹⁴ and Myers’ older brother Gustavus stated in later years that the lives of his mother and siblings were ones of desperate poverty, something he attributed to his father’s incorrigible roving spirit.¹⁵ Still, the poverty the Myers’ family experienced in the desperate years immediately following the Civil War was not a unique experience, especially for southerners such as they were. For Petersburg’s citizens, especially women, mothers and children, the war created a desperate situation: with men away at war dependent women and children were forced to turn to charity to survive and many were reduced to scavenging.¹⁶ But the Myers boys may have been spared the worst because of their illustrious grandfather.

Nearly ninety, Emanuel J. Myers was quite an imposing figure. Standing over six feet one inch tall, he arrived in America from Europe having attained the rank of major in Napoleon Bonaparte’s Old Guard.¹⁷ La Vieille Gard, as it was known, comprised veteran soldiers skilled in advanced bayonet and hand-to-hand combat techniques, members earning their fearsome reputations through the many military engagements of the Napoleonic Wars and personally chosen for this regiment by Bonaparte himself who almost certainly selected Emanuel Myers for a mission to fight the British in the American War of 1812. Emanuel was of Dutch and Jewish heritage. The family name in Holland originally had been van Meers or even, possibly, van Kirk, the van Meers name morphing into Meer, Meere, Meres and eventually into Myers over time. The name is first found in North Holland, a province of the Netherlands, where the various branches of the family acquired social status and even a coat of arms depicting a rampant lion on a shield with armored helmet above all set before a florid background.¹⁸ Emanuel Myers must have been successful in his American military exploits for he was awarded several large land grants in America for his efforts. Family lore holds these parcels included the present-day sites of Fulton Market in Manhattan as well as land in Jacksonville, Florida, territories he eventually forfeited or that were stolen from him by an unscrupulous uncle and as a result of a prolonged absence due to Myers’ recall to France to fight with Napoleon in the decisive Battle of Waterloo on June eighteenth 1815.¹⁹ Emanuel Myers received the Cross of the Legion of Honor for his effort and then emigrated to England where Jerome’s father was born; from there the family made their way back to America. Reasons why the elder Myers settled in Virginia are unknown but there was a prominent Jewish family by the name of Myers with a long history in Norfolk stemming from a Moses Myers who operated a profitable import/export business in that city beginning in 1787. The family firm of Myers and Company became a leading antebellum business concern there and contributed greatly to the reconstruction of Norfolk following the Civil War.²⁰ So it is possible there may have been a very distant family connection that prompted Emanuel Myers to settle in Virginia. And there is evidence that he also enjoyed some social standing as a dashing military hero from the War of 1812. For family lore holds that he met General Robert E. Lee, something that may not have been possible to any ordinary citizen, and an event that generated enough local interest to cause a play to be written about that encounter.²¹ Near the close of the war the feisty ninety-year old Myers senior barely avoided punishment from the occupying Union forces for speaking out openly against the tactics employed by General Sherman during his scorched earth policy in the Deep South.²²

The illustrious past of the Myers family obviously inspired the children despite their financial circumstances. For while the youngest brother, Bernhard, died as a young boy, two of the remaining siblings achieved a degree of prominence: Gustavus became an important social and political writer in the mold of the muckrakers of the Progressive Era while his sister Miriam moved to Alaska to join her father and became an executive in a fur trading company, later she married an influential doctor and eventually moved back to New York City to subsequently rise to a prominent position in the New York Republican party.²³ A third brother, Harry, enterprisingly established a theatre advertising, management and scene painting company, a project in which he would later enlist the young Jerome Myers. Yet the disruptions caused by their impoverished youth impacted the relationships between the Myers siblings. While Jerome and his sister Miriam were close, the relationship between Gustavus and Jerome remained strained, an attempted later reconciliation brokered by Miriam ending in failure.²⁴

Sibling relationships can be difficult, but perhaps the main reason why Gustavus and Jerome never reconciled can be gleaned from the different ways they viewed poverty and social inequality. Despite occasional bouts of depression, Jerome remained steadfastly positive in his assessment and artistic depiction of the lower East Side. In the Jerome Myers Memorial Exhibition Catalogue Harry Wickey succinctly summed up Myers’ outlook on life: He [Myers] was one of them [the common people] from the beginning and enjoyed nothing so much as being in their midst.²⁵ Contrastingly, Gustavus embraced radical politics and in a series of notable books, including The History of Tammany Hall (1901); History of Great American Fortunes (1908); History of the Supreme Court of the United States (1912); and History of Bigotry in the United States (1943), excoriated the status quo. The History of Great American Fortunes is, perhaps, Gustavus’ best-known work and is still in print today. Its tone and argument reveal a temperament diametrically opposite to that of Jerome. Gustavus’ contention that, the great fortunes are the natural, logical outcome of a system based upon factors the inevitable result of which is the utter despoilment of the many for the benefit of the few and his claim that the chief beneficiaries of our social and industrial system have found it to their interests to represent their accumulations as the rewards of industry and ability, and have likewise had the strongest motives for concealing the circumstances of all those complex and devious methods which have been used in building up great fortunes,²⁶ provides an indication of his views. Such statements illustrate why he believed that the American political system needed to be overthrown by the masses whereas Jerome remained seemingly apolitical his entire life, a man who believed that the poor are very well as they are, that the East Side is very well as it is.²⁷ Such a profound divergence of outlook between the two siblings would portend their eventual estrangement. These opposed views were also evident in the way the two Myers boys spoke of the circumstances of their youth, Gustavus recalling an unhappy childhood of desperate poverty and bitterly noting he had not lived with either of his parents from the age of seven to the age of sixteen, whereas Jerome simply, almost matter-of-factly, reminisced that all my life I have lived, worked and played in the meaner streets of American cities. I knew them and their peoples, and was one of them. ²⁸

The resulting poverty the Myers siblings experienced during and subsequent to the Civil War caused the family to become uprooted on several occasions as they migrated from place to place in search of greater economic opportunity and in the hopes of securing greater financial stability. But it should be remembered that such migrations were the experience of many families throughout the American south in the aftermath of war as displaced, disenfranchised and penniless families struck out in an attempt to start afresh. In 1872, at the age of five, Jerome Myers moved north with his siblings and mother to Trenton, New Jersey. Here Jerome entered grammar school, recalling from that experience his terrified reaction while witnessing the male teacher employing an axe to fix mash for the chickens he kept in the schoolyard.²⁹ Yet it is worth noting that despite his circumstances Jerome and his siblings did attend school and received a basic education. Four years later, in 1876, at the age of nine Jerome and the rest of the Myers family moved once again, this time across the Delaware River to West Philadelphia, a thriving, bustling city bursting with national pride at hosting the nation’s Centennial Exposition. They rented a modest home near a vacant field and within walking distance of the great fair held in Fairmount Park, in those days a rural settlement on the western fringes of the city.

Officially dubbed The International Exhibition of Arts, Manufacturers, and Products of the Soil and Mine, the Centennial Exhibition, as it became commonly known, was the first great fair held in the United States, encompassing two hundred seventy five acres of exhibitions representing all the American states plus thirty-seven foreign countries.³⁰ Included among these was a Beaux-Arts building known as Memorial Hall housing an art gallery significantly modeled after the recently opened Victoria and Albert Museum in London and indicative of the aspirations of Philadelphians to charter a museum and school in 1876 with a special view to the development of the Art Industries of the State, to provide instruction in drawing, painting, modeling, designing, etc., through practical schools, special libraries, lectures and otherwise. ³¹ European and American artists were well represented in Memorial Hall, their works encompassing both paintings and sculpture. Art on exhibit tended to reflect conservative, contemporary Victorian taste with the Hudson River School and narrative or genre painting predominating among the American entries, including canvases by Albert Bierstadt, Jasper F. Cropsey, Sanford R. Gifford, and William Hart.³² European entries tended toward depictions of historical genre but there were also examples that represented scenes of the poor and dispossessed, including Heinrich Ewers’ Duet in a Smithy, R. Lehman’s painting, La Rota, the Foundling Hospital in Rome, and Sir Samuel Luke Fildes’ dramatic picture, Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward.³³ This latter group of pictures is significant in so far as they portray scenes of urban poverty: a rag-tag apprentice playing a flute in a blacksmith shop while an infant lays on the ground in a straw basket, crying; a barefoot mother bidding farewell to her babe before she passes the child through the bars of a foundling hospital door; and a line of bedraggled women, children and men waiting to gain entrance to a charity hospital. If the young Jerome Myers attended the fair, which seems at least probable given the immediate proximity of the Myers’ home to the fair grounds, such pictures would have provided a vividly powerful first introduction to art featuring scenes of the needy and working classes. But what is certainly true is that Myers enjoyed and remembered the experience of watching Chinese craftsmen practicing their arts daily in the home of the Chinese Commissioner to the fair, a dwelling and workshop located right next door to the Myers’ family abode and the first documented evidence we have of Myers’ interest in art.³⁴ And like many young boys his age he took special delight when the Forepaugh Circus encamped in the vacant lot near his home, offering him a first-hand look at acrobats practicing and a young equestrienne riding her white horse. When not occupied by the circus that same vacant lot served as the spot where, together with other neighborhood kids, Jerome camped and played games of pirates and hobos.³⁵

But tragedy struck the Myers family in 1877. For although the ten-year old Jerome never forgot the happy but brief reunion with his long-absent father during a home visit Abram made that year, the seminal event he remembered from that fateful date was the fire that consumed the Myers home, burning the structure to the ground, causing the loss of all the family’s possessions and the subsequent hospitalization of their mother who was badly burned in the conflagration and became an invalid as a result.³⁶ As a consequence of her life-threatening injuries, Julia Myers could no longer tend to her four young children and they were farmed out to others for care, Jerome ending up in a Methodist Home. While painful, Myers later recounted his time at that institution with an admixture of stoicism and wonder at the new experiences he encountered there:

In the morning we brushed our teeth and filed in for prayers. Then, after breakfast at the unforgettable long tables, we went to the classroom. Boys and girls were together there….the teacher, a beautiful young woman with auburn hair….A board of trustees made occasional visits and gave donations. When they came, we were all shined up, to make us presentable. On Sunday mornings, we were led out of the home on our way to Sunday school. In line formation, we paraded down a quiet Philadelphia street, our gray capes with the red flannel lining thrown over one shoulder, giving us the appearance of little cadets…Christmas came and we formed in line to go to the nursery, where the large Christmas tree stood with its wonderful trimmings and heaps of presents for us all. ³⁷

As a sensitive child, Jerome began to wonder at the seemingly unfair injustices of life occasioned by living with other children in the close-quarters of the Methodist Home: why should one child receive a punishment and the other a kiss, he pondered.

I could not imagine a Heavenly Father as unjust as humans, slapping one and not another. I went to the Bible, thought and studied until my Methodism began to crumble and my creed to loose its boundaries. Then I read still more, following clue after clue, seeking for a solution to this mysterious division of opinion-a research in which, I recall, Herbert Spencer figured largely…as a result of this unguided quest, which followed from a natural inclination, I attained a fairly good idea of comparative religions and their evolution.³⁸

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) was a British philosopher, biologist, anthropologist, sociologist and political theorist, a leading intellectual of the Victorian era and an early exponent of evolution nearly as famous in his day as Charles Darwin and perhaps best known for coining the term survival of the fittest which he debuted in his Principles of Biology (1864).³⁹ The complex nature and content of Spencer’s thought as expressed in his writings would seem hardly likely to make sense, much less be comprehensible reading, to a ten-year old boy. Rather, it would appear that the doubts and questions Myers formed about Methodism and religion at this time perhaps lay latent, gradually coalescing in his mind in later years when he had time to pursue such books as he did while clerking for a law firm with an extensive library available to him by 1880 at age thirteen. But other books Jerome clearly read at the Methodist Home matron’s library and these held a great fascination for him, particularly the fable of Udine.⁴⁰ Udine relates the tale of a water nymph who becomes human after she falls in love with a mortal; however her humanity is purchased at a price, for she is doomed to die if her lover ever proves unfaithful to her. The myth formed the basis for a popular melodrama in America during the 1860s⁴¹ and became the basis for a play Pelléas et Mélisande (1892) when Myers was fifteen and a later opera (1902) by Claude Debussy. The fantasy world revealed in this story and which so captivated the young Myers provides an indirect proof of his vivid and active imagination; this would persist into adult life taking concrete form in Myers’ love of costumed arts balls; his numerous self-portraits, some clearly modeled after Rembrandt (Self-Portrait in Feathered Hat, 1627); his depiction of Medieval fantasies (The Medieval Ball, 1926), Italian street festivals (Angels of the Festa, 1920) and children’s games and play (The Children’s Theatre, 1925). It should come as no surprise, then, that around the same time the ten-year old Myers read Udine he also took up drawing, an art form he would continue to perfect for the rest of his life. To me, a pencil naturally suggested not only writing but drawing as well, he later noted, just as in the same way, a book was not merely something to read but something to select for a subject. ⁴²

By 1878 Julia Myers recovered sufficiently from her burns to regain custody of her four children. But the family’s economic circumstances remained precarious. The Myers resettled on Passyunk Avenue in South Philadelphia, a diagonal street that interrupts the otherwise grid-like arrangement predominating in the neighborhood and running from Fifth Street, proceeding southwest across the Schuylkill River, and intersecting with Essington Avenue. The choice of neighborhood was significant if for no other reason than by 1870 twenty-seven percent of Philadelphia residents were foreign born with South Philadelphia where the Myers family lived resembling New York City’s lower East Side and the residents of Philadelphia’s Little Italy second only to New York’s in terms of population.⁴³ Many of these immigrants congregated around the environs of Passyunk Avenue near the Italian market centered along Ninth Street which became a locus for Italian immigration especially after the unification of Italy in 1870 prompted many to leave: Philadelphia’s Italian community came from Liguria, Abruzzi, Molise, Campania, Puglia, Basilicata, Calabria and Sicily, many preferring to live in the enclaves of row houses predominating in South Philadelphia. ⁴⁴ Already at eleven years old, then, Jerome brushed elbows with an immigrant population he would come to embrace once he moved to New York City and depict in numerous outstanding paintings. The public school Jerome attended at this time stood on Carpenter Street squarely in the midst of this district, and it may be that the young Myers shared a classroom with immigrant children eager to learn English, obtain an education denied them in the old country, and prosper. If so, such childhood intimacies and memories of them offer an additionally important clue as to why Jerome maintained a life-long love of children, the games they played, and the teachers who schooled them and why, too, Jerome forever held an optimistic and sympathetic view of these immigrant children and their world.

But Jerome’s schooling was cut short by economic necessity, for later in 1878 he took a job as a bundle boy at a local dollar store delivering packages to customers. When this job failed to generate sufficient income to help with family finances, the eleven-year-old Myers was sent to live with John Daly, an Irish saloonkeeper who maintained a tavern at Second and Arch Streets a few blocks northeast of Passyunk Avenue and a mere two to three blocks distant from Philadelphia’s gritty waterfront docks. Jerome roomed at the saloon during the week, only returning home on Sundays when he proudly turned over to his mother his two-dollar weekly salary earned from his job as a soda jerk at Daly’s saloon.⁴⁵ Jerome never forgot the Irishman’s ruddy appearance. Over sixty years later Myers insightfully described the barkeeper as if observing him from a concealed spot to sketch his demeanor, a practice Myers would perfect once he arrived in New York City: a very stout man, of the old school. In fair weather he would always sit outside the saloon. I rather think he was a man of influence, in his own way. Friends would keep coming along, hailing him with, ‘John, come in and have a drink.’…John never refused. Passing my soda fountain…they would go further inside for something stronger.⁴⁶

A mere two blocks to the east of Daly’s Saloon and situated right on the docks at Front Street were the cork factories of Philadelphia. Despite the strenuous and potentially dangerous work, employment in these factories paid more than soda jerking and by 1879 Jerome decided to quit the saloon to labor with other children in the factories. Statistics from the 1870 Philadelphia manufacturing census reveal that there were at least eight cork manufactories situated on the docks at this time utilizing one hundred fourteen machines, some manual others steam powered, and with a total capitalization of $101,000, an indication of the importance and vitality of the industry.⁴⁷ Interestingly, the labor force at these factories was evenly divided into two categories each employing fifty-eight persons: men, and women and youths. As a newcomer, Myers endured the prank of being dumped along with other boys into a large steam vat for heating cork and he suffered severe cuts when he scraped his elbows against the circular knives used in the manufacturing process, barely escaping permanent maiming and the loss of a finger from the large tapering knives used to finish the corks. Still, the salary Jerome earned was sufficient to enable him to put aside the few pennies he gleefully squandered each week on visits to Wood’s Museum, a popular entertainment emporium noted for its Punch and Judy shows as well as musicales and stage plays,⁴⁸ an enchantment perhaps reflected years later in his painting, The Children’s Performance, and in numerous drawings of theatre audiences. The Punch and Judy shows at Wood’s Museum offered an important reflection in the form of comedic puppetry upon the changing social scene of nineteenth century America where increasing economic diversity combined with racial, ethnic and cultural differences in cities to challenge American’s self-understanding as a primarily rural, Protestant, homogeneously Anglo-Saxon culture.⁴⁹ At the age of twelve, Jerome Myers was exposed to an art form that both entertained while constructively poking fun at social convention, an exposure prepping his embrace of immigrants and their cultural diversity.

There is some discrepancy as to whether Jerome suffered a serious knife accident at the factory that landed him in the hospital or whether his confinement there can be attributed to the continual inhaling of cork dust compounded by perpetual malnutrition that severely weakened his constitution.⁵⁰ Whatever the precise circumstances, the resulting three-month long hospital stay he underwent in Germantown, Pennsylvania marked the end of his childhood labor at the cork factory. In 1880 at age thirteen, Jerome embarked upon a new career in a Philadelphia law firm specializing in property conveyances where his duties as an office boy required him to open and close the firm every morning, deliver ads to newspapers and the like. The job proved idyllic. Not only for the wholesome and less strenuous work environment it afforded but also principally because of the vast library available for Jerome to read during the considerable amount of leisure time he had, an experience he later described as literary heaven.⁵¹ Keen to further his education, Myers systematically began reading all the books in the library, starting with those in the upper right hand corner and continuing to the lower left-hand corner,⁵² but the two books that made the greatest impression were John Lemprière’s Bibliotheca Classica and Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. Best described as a "Classical Dictionary Containing a Full Account of All the Proper Names Mentioned in Ancient Authors, Lemprière’s magnum opus long remained the go-to reference work of mythology and classical history enlivened with anecdotes and incidental detail that made the ancient past appear vividly real.⁵³ Ethel Myers later noted of her husband, He learned more in that office than he had in all his schooling, with access to a fine library…which was the foundation for all his later reading, with a drive for education that only a boy who is kept from schooling knows."⁵⁴ The intellectual stimulus provided by this opportunity remained with Myers his entire life. In later years Jerome occasionally would roust his wife from sleep in the middle of the night to discuss various philosophical viewpoints.⁵⁵ Of course, Jerome was still a thirteen-year-old boy, and simultaneously with his exploration of classical mythology he avidly consumed popular pulp fiction of the era including dime novels featuring Deadwood Dick.

In 1881, at age fourteen, Myers together with his family moved yet again, this time to Baltimore, influenced in this regard by the ambitions of his older brother Harry. While Jerome continued to pursue a variety of odd jobs including selling writing paper and envelopes to the oyster boats in Chesapeake Bay, the salient events from his time there included socializing with a host of colorful characters not unlike the market vendors he would later encounter in his rambles through New York City’s lower East Side. Jerome tentatively showed them his first efforts at drawing and watercolor and while these early works no longer survive the verbal encouragement he received from a butter-and-egg man inspired the fourteen-year-old to continue his art.⁵⁶ Besides selling stationery Jerome worked at the Baltimore fruit market, rising every morning at 3:00 o’clock, cold and shivering; this early morning habit stayed with him the rest of his days⁵⁷ and served Myers in good stead when he began exploring the morning pushcart markets of New York. The job of peddling fruit, however brief, gave Jerome direct experience of the life of a market vendor and further illuminates why decades later so many of Myers’ lower East Side pushcart market scenes resonated with authenticity. Besides these individual endeavors, Jerome undertook his first commercial art ventures: working with his brother who procured contracts for painting signage that Jerome subsequently executed and-significantly-securing a job as an art class model at the Baltimore School of Fine Arts, that studio conveniently located above the fruit market arcade.⁵⁸ I was asked to pose before the elegant-looking young ladies and gentlemen of the art class, he later recalled, It was a quiet place, with the antique statues adding to the silence-to me a charmed world, my first glimpse of a career in art that was never to be forgotten.⁵⁹ What might have captured the attention of teacher and students in that art class was Myers’ appearance, his lithe, somewhat rag-tag, young figure an ideal model for a costume class in then-popular genre subjects in the manner of William Merritt Chase’s Turkish Page (c.1876). How long a time Myers sat for this class is unknown. Yet he soon found his hands full with the more mundane experience of theatrical sign painting organized by his older brother Harry who, like Jerome’s father, had been a long-absent figure. Failure at one of his theatre projects resulted in Harry’s temporary return to Baltimore; noticing Jerome’s talent, Harry soon suggested a business partnership, an enterprise they set up in an unused Universalist church near their home.⁶⁰ In 1922, during a wide-ranging interview he gave to Wesley W. Stout of the New York Globe, Jerome confessed to moving with his entire family to New Orleans in order to take advantage of the potentially lucrative sign-painting business generated during the Cotton Centennial Exposition held in that city in 1885, though he makes no mention of this adventure in his autobiography. The daily grind of painting signs with commercial pigments containing lead resulted in Jerome contracting lead poisoning; characteristically, he shrugged this off with good humor, noting, Now I know that the lead finally left my system, but the paint remained.⁶¹

The sign-painting business eventually proved portentous, for in 1886 Harry persuaded the Myers family to move once more, this time to New York City, lured by the potential to earn steady sums in the burgeoning field of commercial work. At first the move proved difficult, the money Jerome earned by door-to-door canvassing for business card, sign painting and house painting jobs providing the family’s only source of revenue.⁶² Jerome escaped the stress and tedium of it all with the help of his active imagination: "I was once on a ladder painting the side of a frame house on Third Avenue. But mentally I was atop Notre Dame, with Esmeralda and the terrible Quasimodo…I was on a ladder painting a frame house; yes, but at the same time I was on