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.