Central Park Bandstand c. 1910

Jerome Myers made this pencil drawing of Central Park Bandstand, and its audience, sometime in the early twentieth century. Look at the nervous energy of those lines, scratched into the paper! Myers is trying to capture something quick, fleeting. I imagine him with his pad, quickly sketching to capture the scene before it changes, wanting to capture a moment of ordinary urban life. You can almost feel the energy of the crowd, and sense the sound of the music drifting on the breeze. I wonder if it was classical, or ragtime? Myers was part of a group of artists known as the Ashcan School, who wanted to show the everyday life of the city, its ordinary people and places. They were influenced by painters like Gustave Courbet, who thought art should be about real life, not just fancy historical scenes.