Self-Portrait

Jerome Myers was an American painter and illustrator who worked within the realm of urban realism, depicting the neighborhoods he lived and worked in, and the people he observed there. Born in Petersburg, Virginia, he moved often with his family, which eventually landed in New York in 1886. There he took up painting signs and advertisements, and he began studying art at Cooper Union and later at the Art Students League. Myers ultimately resisted artistic tradition, however, and he developed his own methods of expression, preferring, in his words, “to interpret life for myself, to render the impression of the city and the people I cared for.” Myers empathized with and often depicted immigrants, who were living in poverty, and struggled against discrimination. His paintings, along with those of “The Eight,” a group of artists with whom Myers associated, helped define modern American realism in the early twentieth century.