Boulevard Market, Paris

Artist Jerome Myers (American, 1867 - 1940)

Date1919

MediumOil on canvas

Dimensions25 1/4 x 30 1/4 in. (64.1 x 76.8 cm)

ClassificationsOil Painting

Credit LineHarriet Russell Stanley Fund

Terms

Object number1945.12

DescriptionBy the teens Myers had developed a reputation for his scenes of Manhattan's Lower East Side. At the suggestion of Roger Fry, the British artist, critic, and Metropolitan Museum of Art curator, he decided to explore London and Paris. Myers sailed abroad during the summer of 1914 with his wife and daughter. The trip was cut short by the outbreak of World War I, but before embarking for home Myers spent several happy months sketching in the Latin quarter of Paris.

In "Artist in Manhattan", Myers tells of the picturesque sites that attracted him--the cathedral of Nôtre Dame, the music halls, the Louvre, the old medieval streets. What attracted him most, however, were the local markets. "I found myself at Les Halles, the Paris market, where--like a homing pigeon--I was again with my market people. It was a French version of the East Side, in a more romantic setup, with the people just as picturesque, although more homogeneous. The early mornings found me at work at the Paris market, under an arch which, I believe, was part of the original wall of Paris. Quaint casements with fastidious flowers, and a mother feeding a child not so fastidious. Underneath, the inevitable flower shop, its massed roses perfuming the air."(1)

Executed five years after his trip to Paris, "Boulevard Market, Paris" is one of a series of paintings closely based on Myers's Parisian sketches. It retains many of the details of pose, costume, and character types found in his 1914 pencil sketch of the scene (whereabouts unknown).(2) The drawing and painting capture the color and vitality of a bustling outdoor market, with vendors proffering arrays of crockery, flowers, vegetables, and other wares on makeshift tables. A variety of people, including little children, gendarmes, and women of all classes purchase household goods and visit with friends and neighbors. The painting's colorful pastel palette and decorative patterning, strongly reminiscent of those of Bonnard and Vuillard, are well suited to the friendly congenial atmosphere and sunny springtime air of the old scene.

MAS
Bibliography:
Jerome Myers, "Artist in Manhattan" (New York: American Artists Group, 1940); Harry Wickey, "Jerome Myers Memorial Exhibition", exhib. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1941); Mrs. Jerome Myers, "A Memorial Exhibition of the Work of Jerome Myers", Virginia-Born Master, exhib. cat. (Richmond: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 1942); "Jerome Myers", 1867-1967, exhib. cat. (Wilmington: Delaware Art Museum, 1967); Grant Holcomb, "Forgotten Legacy of Jerome Myers (1867-1940): Painter of New York's Lower East Side," "American Art Journal" 9 (May 1977): 78-91.

NOTES:

1. Myers, Artist in Manhattan, p. 184.
2. Ibid., p. 176.

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