Miles Evergood

{{Short description|Australian artist (1871–1939)}}

{{Use dmy dates|date=April 2025}}

{{Use Australian English|date=June 2015}}

{{Infobox artist

| name = Miles Evergood

| image =

| imagesize =

| caption =

| birth_name = Myer Blashki

| birth_date = {{birth date|df=yes|1871|01|10}}

| birth_place = Melbourne, Australia

| death_date = {{death date and age|df=yes|1939|03|21|1871|01|10}}

| death_place = Melbourne, Australia

| field = Painting

| training = National Gallery School of Art

| alias =

| movement =

| works =

| influenced_by =

| influenced =

}}

Miles Evergood (10 January 1871 – 3 January 1939) was an Australian artist who achieved recognition in Europe and the United States, as well as his native country. He was the father of American artist Philip Evergood.

Biography

Evergood was born Myer Blashki in Melbourne, eleventh child of Phillip Blashki, manufacturer of masonic regalia and jeweller, and his wife Hannah, née Immergut.{{cite book|last=Hammer|first=Gael|title=Miles Evergood: No End of Passion|year=2013|publisher=Phillip Mathews Book Publishers| location=Sydney|isbn=978-0-9775532-5-9|page=108}}{{cite book|last=Hammer|first=Gael R.|title=Phillip Blashki – a Victorian Patriarch|year=1986|publisher=Blashki Books|location=Melbourne|isbn=0-9589451-0-1|pages=102}}{{Cite Australian Dictionary of Biography |id2=evergood-miles-6123 |title=Miles Evergood (1871–1939) |access-date=2008-02-12 |first=Richard |last=Haese |year=1981 |volume=8}}

Evergood was educated at the Melbourne Hebrew Day School and Angel College, later crediting his ability to write and to argue to influential teachers there, especially Rev. Jacob Goldstein. Goldstein in 1908 wrote a front-page article about Evergood in the New York Hebrew Standard. He studied at the National Gallery School of Art under Frederick McCubbin and Bernard Hall between 1893 and 1895. His friends and colleagues were the group who exhibited the first recognisable style of Australian painting. They included Max Meldrum, George Coates, and James Quinn, who formed themselves into bohemian clubs to discuss contemporary concerns like socialism and the rights of the individual.{{cite book |last=Moore |first = William | title= The Story of Australian Art, Volume 1 | publisher= Angus and Robertson, Sydney | year=1937 |page=20 }}

Evergood exhibited at the Victorian Artists Society, and the Royal Art Society of New South Wales, Sydney, before leaving for the United States in 1898 together with fellow-artist Frank (Francis) McComas. He worked for the Hearst newspapers in San Francisco{{cite book |last=Hutton | first=G |title=The Argus, Melbourne 26 June 1937 | page=26|article= Forty Years of Painting: the Crowded Life of Miles Evergood }} before moving on to New York City, where he exhibited and was subsequently invited to be a member of both the Salamgundi and Lotos Clubs. He went to London, where he married Flora Jane Perry, whom he had probably met in Sydney. The family moved to New York, where art critics Henri Pene du Bois and James Huneker wrote glowingly of his works.{{cite book |last=Huneker | first=James | title = The Sun, New York, 1910 | article=Around the Galleries}} as did Hanna Astrup Larsen in the glossy journal International Studio.{{cite book |last=Larsen | first=Hanna Astrup | title = International Studio Volume 41 New York |year=1910 | publisher=Lane| pages=xl ff }} Miles and Flora had one child, named Philip Howard Francis Dixon Blashki (1901–1973). In 1910 Miles exhibited five paintings in the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists held in New York.

For about twenty years he regularly visited Europe, establishing a good reputation as a painter. After returning with the family to live in England in 1910. In 1914 he had a landscape hung in the Salon (Paris).{{Citation needed|reason=Sources seem contradictory about this, with some not mentioning it at all or saying it happened in 1910.|date=February 2024}} For eight years he exhibited with the International Society, at Burlington House, with the Society of Painters and 'Gravers and the New English Arts Club. He changed his name to Miles Evergood about 1914 in London, to enable his son Philip to get a commission in the British Navy. Then-Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill wrote a handwritten reply to his query, suggesting that "Blashki" was not a suitable name for an officer in an Anglo Saxon navy.{{citation needed|date=November 2013}}

Evergood returned to Australia in July 1931 and worked for eighteen months in Queensland and became a member of the Royal Queensland Art Society. He then went to Sydney and then Melbourne holding exhibitions of his work, and died of cancer in Melbourne on 3 January 1939. Evergood was a capable artist, who mostly painted landscapes in oil with affinities to the Post-Impressionists. He left a de facto partner, Pauline Konitzer Romero, and his son, Philip Evergood, who became an artist living in America, substantially eclipsing the career of his father Miles.

References

{{reflist}}

Bibliography

  • {{Dictionary of Australian Biography|First=Miles|Last=Evergood|shortlink=0-dict-biogE.html#evergood1}}