Jerome Myers Night Concert Analysis

to good advantage. One of Jerome’s pictures sold prompting his friend Louis Mason to write and congratulate him on April third.

“We visited the exhibit this afternoon,” he noted, “and what pleased us most in the whole collection was a little piece-not at all artistic-though practical-I refer to the little card bearing the word SOLD-placed on a picture by Jerome Myers. And this, permit me to say is an illustration of my arguments and a demonstration of my thoughts though you need not quake as I shall not ask a commission-but I knew you were to sell one.”

Myers also received a favorable review on April sixth in the New York American. And two days later Charles McKurtis, acting secretary for the New York Executive Committee On Art, charged

Louis Exposition. The effort proved to be successful beyond Jerome’s imagining for the Jury of Selection awarded the painting a bronze medal, Myers’ first major art award. The painting also attracted the notice of the famed American Impressionist/realist painter William Merritt Chase who promptly purchased it on April twenty-third for his private collection. Night Concert does not seem to have survived. But a closely related picture, Park Scene, Night, 1904 [fig. 40] has and, crucially, may represent a variant of the scene and subject depicted in Night Concert. As indicated by the title, Park Scene, Night is a nocturnal subject. The viewer is invited to assume a stance similar to the one Jerome Myers must have taken as he stood unobserved behind a park bench displayed across the foreground of the picture and upon which four figures, three women and one man, are seated. These look across and into the distance where glowing yellow and orange light and the faint image of additional figures are visible, perhaps where a concert is taking place. It is an arresting scene, the silhouetted and backlit figures holding our attention as we surreptitiously watch their actions, the three women turning in toward each other, the man seeming to stretch out his legs and lean back against the park

Simultaneously, Ethel began to attract favorable news coverage of her own. She received a glowing review in International Studio which praised her sketches of Jewish life as found on Delancey and Hester Streets and among the pushcart markets at the Williamsburg Bridge and noted her facility in making friends with the children to study their games, aspects of her work that certainly deepened the love between her and Jerome, attracted as they were to the same things. And Jerome’s artist friends also contributed toward spreading his name and fame. During the 1905 winter exhibition of the Society of American Artists, Jerome showed his Shrine of St. Rocco prompting a young lawyer and aspiring art collector, George Acheson, soon to become one of Jerome’s steadfast patrons, to write to him: “At last I have seen the Shrine canvas and it is mighty impressive. You ought to be proud of having produced such a notable work. I will take every opportunity of seeing it again.” In that same exhibition fellow artist Bryson Burroughs, a promoter of the classical tradition in the manner of Puvis de Chavannes and soon-to-be appointed Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, exhibited a portrait of Jerome that attracted a good deal of publicity. But perhaps the greatest boost to Myers’ career was the extensive, illustrated article titled “Jerome Myers: Painter of the Common People” that