Raphael Soyer was a Russian-born American artist known for his Social-Realist paintings of daily life in New York. His painterly yet detailed descriptions of people and places, make him among the most important American scene painters of his generation. The Soyer family moved to New York 1912, settling in the Bronx. Raphael's twin brother, Moses, and their brother, Isaac, were also artists. His formal studies were at Cooper Union, the National Academy of Design, and the Art Students League.

Raphael's first solo exhibition was in 1929 and later went on to teach at the Art Students League in New York. Working in oil or lithography, he was an American Scene artist who championed realism and his work portrays the daily life of New Yorkers. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s his work was well received and critically acclaimed.

Soyer's works are in the collections of the Phillips Collection, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the New York Public Library, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard, the Asheville Art Museum, the Princeton University Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. During his life he showed at institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Today, his works are included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.