John Banvard

Who was John Banvard?

John Banvard was a US panorama and portrait painter known for his panoramic views of the Mississippi River Valley.

John Banvard was born in New York and was educated in high school. When his father went bankrupt, he began to travel around the United States, and supported himself with paintings he exhibited.

In 1840 he began to paint large panoramas of the whole Mississippi River valley. He traveled through the area in a boat, made preliminary drawings and supported himself with paintings and hunting. He combined the preliminary sketches and transferred them to a canvas in a building erected for this purpose in Louisville, Kentucky. His largest panorama began as 12 feet high and 1300 feet long and was eventually expanded to about half a mile although it was advertised as a "three-mile canvas". It toured around the nation, and was eventually cut up into hundreds of pieces, none of which still exist today.

Scientific American magazine published a piece under "New Inventions" in its issue of December 16, 1848, describing and illustrating Banvard's mechanism for displaying a moving panorama.