1963.56.FA Philip Evergood, Portrait of My Mother

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.

William Keyse Rudolph, DMA label text, 2005.

Evergood, Philip (American, 1901-1973)

Place of origin: New York (New York/United States): TGN: 7007567 

Oil on canvas on panel

RELATED OBJECTS  

From 1963: Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts, Foundation for the Arts Collection, gift of Marvin Small [1]

From 1963: Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Foundation for the Arts Collection, transferred from the above, May 30, 1963 [2][3]

[1] Pursuant to the April 19, 1963 Agreement of Merger between the Dallas Association and the Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts (DMCA), the collection of the Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts was transferred to the Foundation for the Arts.

[2] The name of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, founded in 1933, was changed to the Dallas Museum of Art in 1983.

[3] The Foundation for the Arts is a non-profit corporation created as a title-holding entity to serve the people of Dallas but to operate independently of the City. The Dallas Museum of Art (at its own cost) is responsible for the care, storage, insurance, conservation and maintenance of the collection, and agrees to maintain the highest museum standards in the management and handling of the Foundation's collection. The title to all works of art purchased or otherwise acquired by the Foundation for the Arts is retained by the Foundation. 

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