Frances Bannerman

Who was Frances Bannerman?

Frances Bannerman 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, following the charter membership of Charlotte Schreiber. She exhibited her work at the Royal Canadian Academy, the Paris Salon, the Royal Society of British Artists and, the Royal Academy and the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.

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.