Moses Soyer

[2][3] Their father, Abraham Shauer, a Hebrew scholar, writer and teacher,[4] raised his six children in an intellectual environment in which much emphasis was placed on academic and artistic pursuits.

[6] The difficulties faced by the Jewish population in the late Russian Empire forced the Soyer family to emigrate in 1912 to the United States, where they ultimately settled in the Bronx.

[10][11] During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Moses and his brother Raphael engaged in Social Realism, demonstrating empathy with the struggles of the working class.

[4] Soyer died in the Chelsea Hotel in New York on September 2, 1974, while painting dancer and choreographer Phoebe Neville.

The untitled painting in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art is an example of his intimate and psychologically penetrating portraits of ordinary people, for which he is best known.