Frances Bannerman

Frances Bannerman (née Jones) (1855 – 1940) was a Novascotian painter and poet. She was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1855. She was the youngest daughter of Lt. Governor Alfred G. Jones and grew up in what is now the Waegwoltic Club. She was an oil painter and a watercolourist, as well as an illustrator in black and white. IN 1886, at age 31, she married Hamlet Bannerman, a London painter, in Halifax and that year they moved to Great Marlowe, England.

In Halifax, Jones had studied under Forshaw Day and in Paris she was a pupil of the popular Salon artist François Nicolas Auguste Feyen-Perrin.

She was the first woman to be elected an Associate of the Royal Canadian Academy (1882), following the charter membership of Charlotte Schreiber (1834-1922). She exhibited her work at the Royal Canadian Academy (1881–83), the Paris Salon (1883 and 1884), the Royal Society of British Artists (1883–86) and (1889–90), the Royal Academy (1885, 1888–91) and the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (1885, 1888–91).

She turned to poetry because of rheumatoid arthritis. Her best-known poem is "An Upper Chamber", which is included in the Oxford Book of English Verse.

Works

• "Le Jardin d'hiver," (submission to the 1883 Salon, is the first Canadian subject ever to be shown in that venue.)
• "An Upper Chamber"
• Art Gallery of Nova Scotia Collection

Legacy

• She had been an artist and is exhibited at the art gallery of The Rooms in Newfoundland.

External links

• Canadian Woman Artists: Artists Database
• Art Gallery of Nova Scotia