East Side Study: The Street Vendor, 1905

Other sketches done on-the-spot from life and datable to circa 1905, ones describing more of the surrounding environment, include The Street Vendor, 1905 [fig. 55] and East Side Study, undated [fig. 56]. In the first of these, crowds of shoppers clog the streets and a vendor stands on the sidewalk beneath a roofed structure with tenements visible in the distance. Rapidly drawn while standing amid the throng, Jerome’s sketch conveys a feel for the density of the neighborhood, dark hatched lines denoting the hustle and bustle of the crowd. Only the vendor with his cap and boxes of wares has been given a degree of specificity. Though the location is unspecified, the presence of a food vendor standing beneath a large wooden or cast iron pavilion
1905, Holiday Dinner, c. 1905, and Salvation Christmas, c. 1905 [fig. 61], all of which served to inspire a major, darkly-colored oil painting, Christmas Dinner which was subsequently featured on the front page of the Sunday Magazine section of the New York Herald on January twenty sixth 1908 [Fig. 62] together with another wintertime painting, A Windy Corner. Whereas the newspaper cropped the right side of the painting and lightened considerably the tonal values, perhaps to make it more publishable in the black and white format of newspapers, the change makes it seem as if the queuing crowd is smaller than it is and that they wait inside a light-filled interior. In fact, Jerome’s picture is quite somber, with deep, rich blacks and browns filing the canvas, emphasizing the anonymous mass of figures and the length of the queue. In lightening Myers’ picture the Herald also highlighted the children and that change further alters the mood of the painting by emphasizing their innocent excitement during the holiday season. A dark palette is something Jerome shared with other Ash Can artists in this period, particularly John Sloan whose
Newspapers and collectors took notice. The New York Evening Mail singled Jerome out for praise as an artist who is “not standing still,” remarking upon Myers’ darker palette of “tones that are harmonized, whether the scene be in an east side street, before a shabby old brick house or wall, or on the heights of New Jersey overlooking the Hudson;” the paper further compared Myers to the great nineteenth century French painter, printmaker, satirist and sculptor Honoré Daumier (1808-1879), citing Myers’ “Gospel Tent” as a picture wherein the artist “imparted to every one of this nervous gathering a distinct character.” “Gospel Tent” is certainly the picture actually titled Mission Tent, 1906 [fig. 63]. Though not particularly religious, Myers was fascinated by the rites and rituals of the lower East Side. Already in 1904 he painted the Shrine of Saint Rocco to wide acclaim. The vibrant spectacle of colorful, emotional crowds, the rich panoply of it all, Myers felt to be deeply human and he would come to paint these feste on several occasions. So it is not surprising that when he chanced upon a Protestant tent revival set up in a vacant slip of land near the East River one dark night he paused to sketch the scene. As in The Shrine of Saint Rocco so, too, on this occasion the focus is the crowd rather than the