Helen Rathbun

Helen Rathbun was a St. Louis painter and designer in the early twentieth century. She came to Missouri by way of California, born in Petaluma in 1870, and was raised by her aunts from the age of nine. She attended the St. Louis School of Fine Arts and studied with Frederick Oakes Sylvester, who encouraged her landscape work. It was here that she also met and studied with Edgar J. Bissell, her most influential teacher, whom she married in 1914.

Rathbun’s time at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts put her in the company of several like-minded artists, including Martha Hoke, whose focus was miniature painting; Cornelia Maury, who painted images of children; and Emily Summa, fellow landscape artist and former student of Frederick Oakes Sylvester. The four women formed a small cohort and began exhibiting together regularly in the early 1900s.

Rathbun’s work, which included both watercolors and oils, was described by one critic as exhibiting “a constant cry for light” (St. Louis Star and Times, October 10, 1913), and was once compared to the renowned American impressionist Mary Cassatt. In her process, Rathbun was not overly concerned with composition, but would rather paint improvisationally “from knowledge” (St. Louis Star and Times, October 10, 1913). This is evident in one work, And the Flood, which the same critic described as depicting “just the brimming river, spreading over everything - water everywhere -- in the masses of clouds hanging heavily above -- technically, just values and color and handling and elimination of unnecessary things from the composition” (St. Louis Star and Times, October 10, 1913).

Rathbun was involved with the St. Louis Artists’ Guild, Society of Women Artists, St. Louis Society of Artists, and the St. Louis Art League, and exhibited locally as well as nationally. Her work was included in the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco in 1915. Rathbun continued to exhibit her work until around 1928, though she and her husband stayed in St. Louis. She died in St. Louis in 1944 and is buried at Bellefontaine Cemetery.