Girl in Stocking Cap

Raphael Soyer’s artistic career began in New York during the Great Depression. Alongside his brothers Moses and Isaac, also painters, Raphael Soyer was committed to depicting working class subjects with whom he felt an allegiance. Unlike the Social Realists, with whom he is often linked, his portraits are not overtly political, but intimate in nature, embodying humanist empathy with their subjects. "If art is to survive, it must describe and express people, their lives and times. It must communicate." A steadfast advocate for representational art, he denounced the widespread domination of abstract art in the late 1940s and 1950s.