John Banvard

John Banvard (November 15, 1815 – May 16, 1891) 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 (3,6 m) high and 1300 feet (369 m) long and was eventually expanded to about half a mile (about 800 meters) 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.

In 1846 he began to travel with this panorama in Europe, Asia and Africa and even gave Queen Victoria a private viewing. His portrait was painted in 1849 by the English artist Anna Mary Howitt. During his travels he also painted panoramas in Palestine and the Nile River Valley.

Banvard had a rivalry with panorama performers John Rowson Smith and Richard Risley Carlisle. Banvard called them imitators and "unprincipled persons". They in turn referred to the "crude efforts of the uncultivated artist" Banvard. Banvard suggested that Smith and Carlisle's panorama was actually painted by George Catlin, who had copied the image after his own panorama.

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