Raphael Soyer (1899, Borisoglebsk, Russia – 1987, New York, NY) was not only a prolific painter, draftsman, and printmaker, but also a catalyst in the Social Realism movement in the United States. Fleeing the tsarist government in the late Russian empire, Soyer arrived in New York and enrolled at the Cooper Union to study painting and drawing where his urban, working-class surroundings became his subjects. Soyer advocated his Realist ethos in his teaching and the art journal, Reality, which he co-founded. After years of exhibiting in group shows and biennials, the Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective in 1967. Soyer’s works are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; National Gallery of Art, DC; Jewish Museum, NY, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, among others.