In the early years of the Great Depression, Philip Evergood associated with members of the so-called “Fourteenth Street School” of artists in New York—a group of realist artists who lived and worked in the vicinity of Fourteenth Street and Union Square—who championed the underclass in their images.

Evergood's Portrait of a Miner is unsettling in the extreme foreshortening of the man's right arm and pickaxe slung over his shoulder, as well as in the seemingly missing left arm, with only the hand and cigarette showing. Despite the compressed space and almost cartoon-like exaggeration of the miner's smiling face, Evergood intends not to make fun, but to evoke sympathy for the worker.