Frances Bannerman

Frances Bannerman (née Jones) (1855 – 1944) was a Canadian painter and poet.

She was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1855. She was the youngest daughter of Lt. Governor Alfred G. Jones and Margaret Wiseman Stairs. She grew up in what is now the Waegwoltic Club. She produced watercolours, oils, and black and white illustrations. In 1886, at age 31, she married Hamlet Bannerman, a London painter, in Halifax and that year they moved to Great Marlowe, England. Her best-known poem is "An Upper Chamber", which is included in the Oxford Book of English Verse.

Bannerman is one of the first North American artists to be influenced by Impressionism. In 1882, she was the first woman to be elected an Associate of the Royal Canadian Academy, and only the second woman to be a member of that academy (the first being Academician Charlotte Schreiber). In 1883, she exhibited in the Paris Salon. One of the works she submitted, Le Jardin d'hiver (The Conservatory), "is the first Canadian subject ever to be shown in that venue." She moved to Italy in 1901, and stayed there until the Second World War forced her to leave. She returned to Torquay, England, where she died in 1944.

• "Le Jardin d'hiver" ("The Conservatory) (submission to the 1883 Salon)
• "An Upper Chamber"
• Art Gallery of Nova Scotia Collection
• Her art is exhibited at the art gallery of The Rooms in Newfoundland.