About the artist:
Yvonne Helene Jacquette was an American painter, printmaker, and educator. She was known in particular for her depictions of aerial landscapes, especially her low-altitude and oblique aerial views of cities or towns, often painted using a distinctive, pointillistic technique. Through her marriage with Rudy Burckhardt, she was a member of the Burckhardt family by marriage. Her son is Tom Burckhardt.
Jacquette taught at Moore College of Art and was a visiting artist at the University of Pennsylvania from 1972 to 1976. She taught at Parsons School of Design from 1975 to 1978 and at the University of Pennsylvania from 1979 to 1984.
Her three-part mural "Autumn Expression" (1980) is in the U.S. Post Office in Bangor, Maine. According to the Smithsonian American Art Museum's online bio, Jacquette held various academic positions and was also honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1990.
In an interview with art critic John Yau in The Brooklyn Rail, Jacquette said of the way she came to begin painting aerial views:
It happened by accident, of course. I didn’t ever plan it, I was going to visit my parents who had just moved to California and I was in a plane with watercolors and I started to see that the clouds were amazing when you’re right in them.
Jacquette married Rudy Burckhardt in 1964. She was a visiting artist at the Siena Art Institute in 2012.
Jacquette lived in New York City, and died on April 23, 2023.
As noted in The Female Gaze, "Jacquette's works began with direct studies made with pastel on paper or photographs taken from airplanes, skyscrapers, or rented single-engine planes. She often took flights primarily to study cloud formations and aerial perspectives. She was has been described as the 'Canaletto of the skies.' Her paintings are intensely colored, elaborately detailed panoramas of cities, and the countryside at various day and night. Unique views and radical angles draw attention to the act of perception, anthropomorphizing the buildings that occupy her urbanscapes."
