Martin Borgord - 6 portrait studies

The following biography is from the archives of askART.

Martin Borgord was a painter of landscapes, portraits, still lives and marine views, as well as a sculptor at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries.  His paintings depict a  kind of realism which uses a very accurate reproduction of the painted subject.  In 1916 and 1918, he worked and exhibited at Old Lyme, Connecticut with his studio behind the Florence Griswold House.

Borgord was born in Norway, the son of Petter Klemethaugen and Johan Oudensdotter Vasrus. Not long after his son's birth, Klemethaugen bought a large farm called Borgord.  As often the case at the time, the family became known under the name of the estate.  His parents passed away when he was quite young, and Martin was raised by an aunt and uncle in Oslo.   

Having heard remarkable stories from friends about the opportunities in the United States, Borgord, who wanted to become an artist, left Norway for the U.S. at age fifteen.  In Pittsburgh he met painter William Henry Singer, son of a wealthy steel merchant, who later became a lifelong friend.

He also studied in Paris with Jean-Paul Laurens and William Merritt Chase, and by 1899, he was showing his work at the Macbeth Gallery in New York City.  In 1901, he went with Singer and Singer's wife Anne to Laren, Holland, where he lived and had a studio at the Singer's villa, called "De Swans". He earned a medal at the Salon Exhibition of 1905 in Paris, France, but returned to Pittsburgh around 1906.  There he became manager of the Art School of the Carnegie Institute and the Allegheny School of Painting.

Borgord exhibited at the National Academy of Design in New York in 1913 and 1919.

Traveling between the U.S. and Europe,  he returned to Laren in 1911, to the house of the Singer family. In 1916 and 1918, the friends traveled and worked in Norway and the United States.  In 1919, he visited Norway again, but later returned to the U.S.

From 1921 through 1928 he resided at the Mission Inn in the Riverside, California  area, and died March 25, 1935 in Riverside.  Martin Borgord is buried at the St. Jan Cemetery in Laren, Holland.

Sources: 
Connecticut and American Impressionism, The William Benton Museum of Art, Introduction by Harold Spencer, Schwarz-Philadelphia
Edan Hughes, Artists in California, 1786-1940
De Valk Lexicon