Street Group by Jerome Myers

Jerome Myers painted Street Group in 1923, and it now lives at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Unlike his contemporaries chasing wealthy patrons, Myers paid his artistic debts in human hours spent on the Lower East Side, producing over a thousand drawings of immigrant life.

Look first at the small girl in the white dress at center. Her bright figure is the visual anchor that pulls your eye through the crowded, shadowed street. Then move left to find a crouching child with a small dog, a tender moment at the painting's margin. The worn wooden facade fills the upper half, its layered boards and shop signs a social-history record of how New York's tenement poor lived.

Myers was born in Virginia in 1867 and raised moving between cities before landing in New York for good. He studied at Cooper Union and the Art Students League, but left Paris after only months, saying his true classroom was the streets of the Lower East Side. He became a key organizer of the 1913 Armory Show, the legendary exhibition that introduced European modernism to America, yet his own brush stayed devoted to the neighborhood outside his door.

There is no record of this painting sparking a bidding war. Its value was never about the market. Myers painted the city because the city was his life, and he asked for nothing more.