O-851

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painting (portrait)

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The Right Honourable Sir Robert Laird Borden

Portrait of Prime Minister Robert Borden

The artist Kenneth Forbes’ admiration for Prime Minister Robert Borden was plain when Forbes wrote that he had arranged his official portrait to enhance his subject’s “broad soldiers and beautiful, even white hair.” Forbes was painting in 1947, from photographs, 10 years after Borden’s death.

Borden was born in 1854 in the verdant village of Grand Pré, in the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia. He was Prime Minister during the First World War and created the Canadian Expeditionary Force and the War Measures Act, and introduced income taxes. He also fought for an independent Canadian voice in world affair.

Kenneth Forbes

Kenneth Forbes was born in Toronto in 1892, and first studied art with his father, the portraitist John Colin Forbes. He also studied in England and Scotland, until he joined a British machine-gun corps to fight in the First World War. He was gassed and wounded, and twice mentioned in dispatches for gallantry. In 1917 he became a Canadian war artist, and his gripping painting Canadian Artillery in Action is on permanent display at the Canadian War Museum. Forbes was an outspoken foe of modern art and helped to establish the traditionally minded Ontario Institute of Painters.