Jan and Cora Gordon

The Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer of Saturday 1st February 1941 made this comment about a new book: Through China's Wall. By Graham Peck. (Collins 12s. 6d.) An engaging record of an unconventional journey through China: a journey which begins in Peking at the beginning of its relaxed period, when even the "impudent" conquest preparations of the Japanese failed to disturb the city's tranquil life, and ends in a Peking whose homes are being searched for offending pictures of Chain Kai-shek, whose policemen and conductors are compulsarily learning Japanese, and where overhead floats a balloon trailing the names of cities newly conquered by the invaders. Mr. Peck is a diligent observer; his broad canvas is packed with discriminating, illuminating detail. Enhanced by Mr. Peck's own delightful illustrations, the volume is forcibly reminiscent of the work of Jan and Cora Gordon and has the blessing of Pearl Buck - a blessing which carries much weight. ...

The Oakland Tribune of 31st October 1926 has an enthusiastic small article about Jan and Cora Gordon as follows: " Jan and Cora Gordon who roam the wide world in search of color, of people and of adventure, have again blazed into the heavens of travel literature with "Two Vagabonds in Sweden and Lapland." Their art is sure, their vision sympathetic and their method of telling diverting. Added to this are illustrations as characteristic and vivid as in their earlier work. To follow two such "vagabonds" around the globe is to know the world's people as they truly are. One learns little nationalism, to be sure; and less of politics, but the reader soon comes to understand "how the other half lives," which should be the objective of all good travel books ." For more on the " Two Vagabonds in Sweden and Lapland " book, see: - "Two Vagabonds in Sweden" 1926. See: http://janandcoragordonart.blogspot.com/2014/05/jan-and-...

An article in the Glasgow Herald of March 1948 reported on Cora Gordon 's art lectures in Glasgow that month and gave the following description of her appearance: " Wearing a silver turban and a black cloak over her white lace blouse and long full velvet skirt, emphasising her pale creamy complexion, and with long slender fingers, she looked every inch the artist. The turban is her distinctive headdress and yesterday at the Lady Artists' Club she wore another version of it in Pompeian red, with a fringe hanging to her shoulder ." Some of the biographical details are enjoyable, such as the teenage Cora Josephine Turner forcing her father, a "respectable man of medicine", to allow her to study art by threatening to go on stage, "an even less respectable profession." She then succeeded in his condition of passing the L.R.E.M. music examination within three months in order to be permitted to leave for France. The following is an interesting d...

On their American journey  in 1927 and 1928, Jan and Cora Gordon gave illustrated lectures under the management of William B. Feakins (Wm. B. Feakins, Inc., Times Building, New York). He is mentioned in " Star-dust in Hollywood ": "The lecture-agent in New York had been a little coy of us : so many English lecturers of late had been unsatisfactory ; the big names did not always guarantee an effective presence on the platform or a carrying voice. ....... but after we had enticed the agent to a New York flat and had got him prancing like a bear round the room to the throb of a Spanish farouka we knew that he was won." When Feakins invited the Gordons to play to his staff, he supplied ice-cream to all. "In the middle of this impromptu feast two of the sternest of club women stalked in." Feakins introduced "his new discovery, ourselves. They inspected us from head to foot with the critical eyes of a housewife examining a fowl on the poulterer's...