Background
He was born on November 15, 1815 in New York City, the son of Daniel Banvard and brother of Joseph Banvard. In childhood uncertain health prevented his following outdoor sports, so he amused himself with scientific experiments, verse making, and drawing.
Education
His only formal education was received in the New York High School and when he was fifteen he was thrown upon his own resources by the financial failure and death of his father.
Career
He went to Louisville, where he became a drug clerk. When he should have been putting up prescriptions, he was drawing caricatures with chalk upon the walls. Dismissal resulted. Welcoming freedom, he began to paint, but his pictures brought no money and he soon started off with his paint-box after adventure. At New Harmony, Ind. , he turned a flatboat into an art gallery and floated down the Wabash River, exhibiting his paintings. A bushel of potatoes, a dozen eggs, or a fowl was an acceptable admission fee to the "show boat. " Ignorance of the channel, with its snags and sand-bars, malaria, and scarcity of food made this venture a failure. Pecuniary returns were better when he gave up his boat and painted and exhibited in New Orleans, Natchez, Cincinnati, and Louisville.
His ambition was always for size, and he next painted a panorama of Venice, which he had never seen. Having accumulated a small capital, he purchased a museum at St. Louis but lost both capital and museum. Undiscouraged, he peddled goods down the Ohio River to fill his purse. In the spring of 1840, he embarked on the Mississippi River in a skiff, with the project of making drawings for a grand panorama, to be the largest painting in the world. He traveled thousands of miles, exposed to many hardships, drawing incessantly, and sleeping under his skiff with his portfolio for a pillow. With his drawings completed, he erected a building in Louisville and painted the scenes on canvas woven for the purpose at Lowell, Massachussets When finished, the "Panorama" was advertised as covering three miles of canvas. The fidelity of the portrayal was testified to by a number of Mississippi River captains and pilots. Its value was geographical; artistic merit it had little or none. It was of the chromo type, and in 1861 Banvard painted the picture, "The Orison, " from which the first American chromo was made. "The Panorama of the Mississippi" was exhibited throughout the United States and in London, where it was admired by Queen Victoria.
During the Civil War, Banvard furnished to Generals Frémont and Pope information about Island No. 10 in the Mississippi, which assisted in its capture. He later traveled in Europe, Asia, and Africa, and painted scenes in Palestine and a "Panorama of the Nile. " His pictures were always rapidly executed and with a certain crude vigor but without technical skill. Banvard was almost as facile a writer as a painter. He wrote about 1, 700 poems, some of which appeared in magazines. He also wrote A Description of the Mississippi River (1849), A Pilgrimage to the Holy Land (1852), Amasis, or the Last of the Pharaohs (1864), The Private Life of a King, Embodying the Suppressed Memoirs of the Prince of Wales, afterwards George IV (1876), The Tradition of the Temple, a poem (1883), Carrinia (1875). The dramas Amasis and Carrinia were performed respectively at the Boston Theatre and the Broadway Theatre, New York.
As a writer, Banvard's claim to artistic excellence is probably no stronger than as a painter. But his personality was rugged and original. In his mature years his appearance was like that of many Mississippi River pilots--a thick-set figure, with heavy features, bushy dark hair, and rounded beard. In 1880 he settled in Watertown, where he lived with his children. He died there May 16, 1891.