Hortense Gordon

Born in Hamilton, ON, Hortense Gordon (1889–1961) was an artist and educator and one of the founding members of the Painters Eleven in 1953, the first abstract painting group in English Canada and the counterpart to the Quebec-based Automatistes and Plasticiens. The eldest member of the Painters Eleven, Gordon’s career spanned from early work as a figurative and landscape artist inspired by French Impressionism to her unique interpretations of abstract expressionism which began in the 1930s and solidified with her studies under Hans Hoffman in 1947 at Provincetown, Cape Cod (other notable BC artists in attendance included Lionel Thomas, Don Jarvis and Takao Tanabe).