Artist Joan Fanning was noted for her distinctly individual style, and well-regarded in New Zealand and overseas.

Fanning’s evocative and observational paintings of landscape scenes, still lifes and people have a vibrancy and atmospheric quality to them. Fanning’s works move through moody, washed impressionist works, to realist depictions of objects and to a more expressionist styles rendered in bright, lively colours, as seen in Tree Ferns.
Fanning also made lithograph work, noted by Victoria University’s 1964 Salient Magazine as being ‘the best seen at recent exhibitions in Wellington’ and ‘particularly suited to her style’.

Joan Fanning (born 1912, Wellington – died 2000, Wellington) studied in London’s top art schools, She was included in exhibitions of Young Commonwealth Artists in London and exhibited with the Auckland Society of Arts and the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts in Wellington. In the 1950s, Fanning was listed as a ‘serious’ painter and printmaker by the Director of the National Art Gallery, alongside heavyweights W. A. Sutton, Melvin Day, Toss Woollaston, and John Drawbridge and presented in major solo shows in Wellington. Fanning was listed in the Concise Dictionary of New Zealand Artists, Painters, Printmakers, Sculptors, 2000 by Kate McGahey.