Evening, 1916, oil on canvas, 12 x 16, signed lower right: Boris Bernhard Gordon, 1916, Originally from Bern, Switzerland, Gordon moved to the United States around 1905, first settling in California, and quickly made a name for himself painting portraits of public figures. Upon relocating to Houston, Gordon was commissioned in 1910 to paint the portrait of Colonel Rienzi Melville Johnson, Confederate veteran, newspaperman, and politician. In the early 1920s, Gordon lived in New York City as a portraitist to the upper class, and returned to Houston before 1940. Though he lived and worked in Texas, it is known that Gordon also maintained a studio in Washington, D.C., where he painted the portraits of Presidents Hoover, Eisenhower, and Truman. Thirteen works painted by Gordon currently hang in the United States Capitol building, and thirty-seven works are in various state capitol collections. This modernist landscape, an outlier among Gordon’s portraits, bespeaks a captivation with the American Southwest and a love of painting, reflected in the artist’s sumptuous, spontaneous brushstrokes.