Bannister eventually studied at the Lowell Institute with the artist William Rimmer for about a year. Because of his daytime photography business, he mostly took his drawing classes at night. Through Rimmer and the community at the Studio Building, Bannister was inspired by the Barbizon school-influenced paintings of William Morris Hunt, who had studied in Europe and held numerous public exhibitions in Boston around the 1860s. He also formed a temporary painting partnership with Asa R. Lewis that lasted from 1868 to 1869. During that partnership of "Bannister & Lewis", Bannister began to advertise himself as both a portrait and landscape painter.