Philip Evergood

Untitled, Boy Eating Watermelon

1960

Philip Evergood was an American Social Realist painter. An advocate for civil rights, much of his work depicted the daily lives of working-class people, as seen in his hallmark piece, Sunnyside of the Street (1950). “Actually if you paint a group of country folk having a feast like Brueghel did it's social painting, too,” the artist said. “But then when you get down to paintings like The Massacre of the Innocents (1566) by Brueghel when Holland was occupied by the Spanish and you have people smashing doors down and bringing out infants and cutting them in half with swords then you're doing a very brave kind of social statement.” Born Howard Blashki in 1901 in New York, NY, his father was the Australian landscape painter Miles Evergood. It was his father that anglicized the family name from the Jewish-Polish Blashki to Evergood, when Philip was a child. Moving with his parents to London in 1909, he went on to study at Eton College and Cambridge University. Set on pursuing a career in art he enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art, studying under Henry Tonks. Returning to New York in 1923, he studied with the Ashcan School painter George Luks. During the Great Depression, the artist worked for the WPA, creating murals in both Queens, NY, and Jackson, GA. Evergood died in 1973 in Bridgewater, CT. Today, his works are included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.