Collection: Jane Bannerman Travel Sketchbooks Collection, 1929, 1955-2011
Description: The New York Historical has been awarded funding to digitize the Jane Bannerman Travel Sketchbooks Collection (1929, 1955-2011) and make it freely available in NYH’s Shelby White & Leon Levy Digital Library and DCMNY. The sketchbooks contain watercolors depicting scenes from New York City and locations around the globe, providing visual documentation and showing the creative expression of an independent woman, life-long New Yorker, and world traveler during the second half of the 20th century and into the early 21st century.
Jane Campbell Bannerman (1910-2014) was an artist and designer who studied illustration and advertising at Parsons School of Design (then known as the New York School of Fine & Applied Art). She spent the 1929 academic year abroad at Parsons’ Paris Atelier, an experience that sparked a lifelong love of travel and sketching. “I hadn’t seen any of the world until then,” she said. “Paris started my life.” She created watercolors of the places, people, and scenes she saw while traveling around the world. Her images reveal the perspective of a mid-century American tourist looking at other countries and cultures, and what she saw as “local color” might sometimes be considered insensitive to modern eyes. However, the sketchbooks also demonstrate her considerable talent as an artist who could capture the essence of a view, an event, or a monument in a few brushstrokes.
The goal of the project is to add to NYH’s growing digital archive of resources documenting the visual history of New York City and destinations further afield, particularly from the perspective of traditionally underrecognized populations such as women, and ultimately make this collection available to a wider audience that includes students, teachers, and the general public.