Philip Evergood
(American, 1901–1973)
Pittsburgh Family
1944
Oil on canvas, 49" x 38"
Sax Brothers Purchase Fund
The son of an Australian landscape painter,
Philip Evergood was sent to England to be educated at Eton and Cambridge,
and later at the Slade School of Art. He came to the United States
in 1923 to work at the Art Students’ League with the social
realist George Luks, a leading member of the Ashcan School, which
certainly furthered his growing interest in social and humanistic
themes. Evergood’s output never fell into neat categories of
style or subject. While his earlier work was constructed primarily
around Biblical stories, at different points in time he would be
called a social realist, a satirist, an expressionist, and a faux-primitive
painter. Regardless of these labels, his work reveals itself as a
consistent and sustained study of relationships between people and
the environments and actions in which he so closely and thoughtfully
observed them.
In Pittsburgh Family, Evergood positions a mother, father and infant
child in a tender embrace before the cacophonous steel industry of
that city. The artist mirrors the family by placing an image of a
bird’s nest with parents feeding and protecting a baby bird
on the red-orange framework of a skyscraper at the painting’s
center. Today, our first reading of this painting might be that it
is an environmental statement, as both humans and animals struggle
to survive in a polluted man-made landscape, although its message
of family solidarity and compassion is timeless.
Philip Evergood was one of sixteen well-known American artists who
participated in a highly successful Summer Guest Artist program at
the University of Minnesota Duluth between 1949 and 1970. As a result
of this association, the Tweed Museum of Art acquired Evergood’s
Pittsburgh Family (1944) and Swimming Lessons (1961) through the
Sax Brothers Purchase Fund. |
