Myron G. Barlow (May 1870 in Ionia – 14 August 1937 in Étaples) was an American figurative painter known for his paintings of the lives of rural French women.

[16] His father had been born in Breslau, Germany, immigrating to the United States in 1849 and serving in the Union Army with the 5th Michigan Infantry Regiment during the Civil War.

[13][19] His paintings have been compared to Vermeers, many featuring women set into a "dreamlike atmosphere", caught frozen in a moment, with the image dominated by an overall color.

He used three models in this period; Julie Sailly, Louise Descharles (born in 1909) whom he would paint for twenty years, and her sister Marie.

Barlow was a regular exhibitor in the Paris Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts (National Society of Fine Arts), and his name was used in newspapers in the United States to denote American participation in the event.

[32] In 1914, he was a founding member of a group in France calling themselves the American Artists Association, along with Frederick Carl Frieseke, Richard E. Miller, Myron Barlow, George Elmer Browne, Max Bohm, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Walter Griffin, John Noble, Charles Hawthorne and George Oberteuffer.

[5][33] Barlow returned temporarily to the United States when the German army in World War 1 overran the area he lived in, near Belgium.

[11] He lived for a period in "artist's colony", whose members included Joseph Gies (one of Barlow's former teachers), Frances Paulus, Ivan Swift, and John Morse.

[46] Hitler's 3rd Reich shut down most places of worship and schools for Jewish people in 1939 and sent the population to concentration and extermination camps in 1941-1942, including Auschwitz, Sobibor, Riga, and Theresienstadt.

[4] It was mentioned that Barlow looked at the work of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo in France, and he himself studied and possibly painted ceilings in Paris.

The paintings include The Patriarch in which Abraham welcomes three strangers, The Prophet in which 11 figures react to the words of a prophet, a painting of older European Jews from the middle ages teaching the young, and The Immigrant depicting an immigrant with prayer book passing the Statue of Liberty.

[4] In a separate event, when the older Beth El Temple was converted into the Bonstelle Theatre, Barlow directed the interior decoration in "Italian style.

His hometown newspaper, the Detroit Free Press, commented on his shift, saying, "The low, dark tones in which Mr. Barlow painted at the time of his last exhibition [1907[57]] have given place to harmonious gray and blue tints.