Mount Nebo no. 2 c.1931-32

Miles Evergood was born Myer Blashki in Carlton, Victoria, to Polish parents. After beginning an apprenticeship with a commercial photographer in Sydney, he studied at the National Gallery School, Melbourne, before relocating to New York. There, he established a successful career, exhibiting under various names, including – from 1909 – Miles Evergood, the surname an English translation of his mother’s maiden name, Immergut.

In 1931, Evergood spent a year in Brisbane, joining the Royal Queensland Art Society and holding an exhibition at Jeanettie Sheldon’s Gainsborough Gallery. Painted freely in a lively, though hardly experimental palette, his artworks nonetheless proved challenging for Brisbane’s conservative audiences.

Mount Nebo no.2 c.1931–32 is notable from the perspective of Queensland’s social history. In the early 1930s, when the Depression saw living standards plummet, the state government established work-relief programs that, as historian Carmen Black has documented, included the ‘construction of numerous tourist roads in scenic areas like Mount Nebo . . . opening up those landscapes’. Such initiatives had the added benefit of providing artists such as Evergood with access to inspiring new subject matter.