Helen R. Rathbun

While in the Normal School, from which she was graduated, Helen R. Rathbun showed such decided talent that Frederick O. Sylvester, her instructor, urged her to devote her undivided time to this branch of art.

[2] The Distant Hills was a scientific study of color and a feeling for the dramatic, common in all of her work — swiftly moving clouds, flowing water, the glitter of sunshine, the action and movement that nature gives to her mise en scene.

Describing one called And the Flood, it was 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 the elimination of unnecessary things from the composition.

One large painting, The Broken Toy, was a bit of child nature — the little man who seeks the source of sympathy, the eternal feminine where all troubles are brought and from the artistic side it is a very successful effort to show the spread of the sunshine thrown over the scene — children, lawn, trees.

A boy with a short stick with a bent pin tied to a string angling for a fish that never bites, and that is somewhat like the artistic profession — a paint box and some brushes and a hard-hearted public.

[2] In her old-fashioned home, brought up by her aunties since she was nine years old, Rathbun spent her life; the antique furnishings and quaint surroundings developed in her such a love of this atmosphere that many of her pictures show the influence — the peace, placidity and harmony in her interior subjects rests one to look at them.