Yvonne Jacquette
Painted cities from aeroplane windows and rooftops, at night, from drawings made in the air.
Yvonne Jacquette was born in Pittsburgh in 1934 and studied at the Rhode Island School of Design. From the early 1970s she worked almost exclusively from above, making pastel drawings from commercial flights, helicopters and the tops of tall buildings and then working them up into oils in the studio. Manhattan at night, the Mississippi, the mills of Maine and Tokyo all appear as fields of small, separate strokes that read as lights and traffic from a distance. She was married to the photographer Rudy Burckhardt and worked between New York and Maine until her death in 2023.
A steady American market, led by the large night oils on canvas, with the pastels made in the air forming a substantial and more accessible body of work — these are the drawings the paintings come from and are prized accordingly. Jacquette also made lithographs, woodcuts and aquatints in modest editions with several New York workshops. The pastels are unfixed or lightly fixed and are extremely vulnerable to abrasion and vibration; glazing, mounting and any past handling are material to value.
If you own a work by Yvonne Jacquette
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.