American Art Collaborative

This portrait is a memorial to Philip Evergood's mother, Flora, who died on March 10, 1927, shortly after her son began this portrait. As he later remembered, "My mother was dying of cancer in a little room on Lexington Avenue. I was sitting talking to her in the window, and I looked at her face and I said, 'Mother, I've never seen anyone with such beautiful eyes....I'd like to paint you.' So she walked over to her little couch-bed, lay down, and crossed her hands over the pain, as she often did, and I got out my paints and went to work." Evergood completed the face and hair before his mother's death. Over the next nineteen years, while he became an important- and sometimes controversial-social protest artist, he completed it, adding the high-heeled shoes Flora Evergood enjoyed wearing.