We know that Gordon was primarily an artist and a trained artist at that. He attended the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, and he exhibited twice at least in the Royal Hibernian Academy.
His first exhibition was in 1916 where he had two pieces on show. It was an unfortunate start as that was the year when the Academy itself burned to the ground during the annual exhibition.
The Easter Rising was in full swing and the Helga was shelling the GPO from its dock at the Custom House. Unfortunately the Academy was in the line of fire and got hit. Everything in the building was lost: all of the pieces on exhibition and all of the Academy's own art collection. The only thing saved was the Academy's own constitution.
Undaunted, Gordon had another piece in the following year's exhibition, The Dead Rebel, a portrait of a dead rebel which he had seen in St. Stephen's Green during the Rising. This piece subsequently hung above the fireplace in his home in Sutton until his death some thirty years later.
I don't know what of his fine art might be in the possession of individuals. I haven't been able to trace any sales. But as far as any pieces in the public realm are concerned, I only managed to find the one, the peasant woman's head at the top of this post. I must thank Dr. Margarita Cappock for finding this, buried deep in the Hugh Lane (formerly the Municipal) gallery in Parnell Square, next to where I went to school.
There seems to have been a considerable amount of Gordon's fine art in his house in Sutton when he died, including nudes from his Metropolitan School days, but these were destroyed by his estrnged wife Biddy in a bonfire in the back garden before she left to return to England, taking the children, Dolores and Richard, and their inheritance, with her.
The end result of all of this is that Gordon is now known exclusively for his cartoons, insofar as he is known at all.
This is less upsetting than it might have been as the cartoons are beautifully rendered and the artist shows through in virtually all of them.
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