Anna Barbara Bansi

Anna Barbara Bansi (Fläsch, 1777 – Paris, 1863) was a Swiss-born French painter, also known as Barbara or Babette. She is of interest for a career shaped by movement between Paris, Italy and Rome, and by her contact with several leading artists of her time.

The daughter of a reformed minister with little money, she was taken in at the age of six by Zürich philanthropist Johann Caspar Schweizer, who brought her to Paris in 1786. After Schweizer left for the United States in 1794, she stayed in France to train as a painter, studying with François Gérard and Joseph-Benoît Suvée. She first exhibited at the Salon of 1798 and, in 1802, moved to Italy to complete her education. There she worked for a time as companion to Letizia Ramolino, Napoleon's mother, and converted to Roman Catholicism.

A drawing of her by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, now in the Louvre, survives from her Italian years. Her only known pastel, which may in fact be a black chalk drawing, depicts the violinist Pierre Baillot. In 1808 she married the Italian surgeon Lorenzo Nannoni, who died in 1812. Two years later she returned to Paris and exhibited an oil painting of the Virgin at the Salon. She was later appointed drawing teacher at the schools of Saint-Denis and Sainte-Clotilde. In 1832 she donated two pastels by Adélaïde Labille-Guiard to the Louvre. Several of her works are known, including a self-portrait from 1793.