Helene DeLaunay

Helene DeLaunay was a well-known landscape artist in Kansas City, Missouri, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As a founding member of Kansas City’s Paint Club, her paintings were frequently singled out for praise by critics and reproduced in the newspaper. DeLaunay is noted as one of Kansas City’s leading women artists in the late nineteenth century.

DeLaunay was first mentioned in Kansas City’s directory in 1888, although her first exhibition isn’t noted in The Kansas City Star until 1896, when a selection of her watercolors was exhibited at Swan’s art gallery in Kansas City. The same year she was mentioned in her husband’s obituary as a portrait and landscape painter.

In 1897 the Paint Club, an organization of professional artists, was started and DeLaunay was included in the first list of active members. The first exhibition was held in the Kansas City Public Library’s reception rooms and more than 100 paintings were exhibited, including a large number of landscapes by DeLaunay. Two paintings were called out by name, Shocks of Corn and A Hillside, which was also reproduced by a sketch artist as part of The Kansas City Star’s article. The following year, during the second exhibition of the Paint Club, DeLaunay exhibited twenty landscapes that she created while working with fellow artists Floy Campbell and Mrs. Hoyd Keith in Lake Forest, by Bonner Springs, Kansas. Her paintings received particular praise, and again one of her paintings, The Kansas Valley, was reproduced by a sketch artist to illustrate The Kansas City Star’s article.

Although DeLaunay continued to live in the Kansas City area and notes "artist" as her occupation in both the 1910 and 1920 U.S. censuses, little is published about her artistic work during this period. Although the record of her artistic production after the 1890s is scant, the quality of her work is significant enough for art historian William Gerdts, author of the regional painting survey Art Across America, to write that DeLaunay was one of the two leading women artists during the 1890s in Kansas City, specifically noting her, “... tonal nocturnal and winter scenes.” (Gerdts, Art Across America, 65 )