The Mission

Soyer's lithograph is a touching character study of down-and-out men dining on a meager repast of free sandwiches and coffee during the early years of the Depression. Soyer's own experience as a poor immigrant growing up in a New York tenement allowed him to sympathize with his subjects. Carl Zigrosser, a long-time curator of prints and drawings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, characterized Soyer in 1942 as "a voice of the nameless multitude, the downtrodden and underprivileged, the immigrant aspiring to freedom and a full life."