Helen R. Rathbun

Helen Rhind Rathbun Bissell (July 1, 1870 – November 9, 1944) was a St. Louis artist, one of the strongest landscape painters. Her work, considered almost masculine in its strength, possessed much of that swing and vigor which put the work of Cecilia Beaux and Mary Cassatt in the first rank of American painters.

Biography Helen Rhind Rathbun was born in Petaluma, California on July 1, 1870, the daughter of Edwin Rathbun and Katherine Donaldson. 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. A short course in the St. Louis School of Fine Arts was of much value, but she then mainly trained under Edgar J. Bissell (1861-1928), and later married him.

Helen R. Rathbun worked in water colors and oil and children were her favorite subjects, although interior scenes were also handled with superior skill, and outdoor studies, landscapes and street scenes showed an effort to realize the light and air which nature surrounded and spread over all of her works, a constant cry for light and always more light. In 1911 she exhibited at the Dietrich Gallery. In 1915 she exhibited two paintings in the Panama Pacific International Exposition.

Many of her pictures gained honors as well as prizes. In 1909 she was awarded the first prize at the woman's exhibit of the Artists' Guild. This was An Autumn Landscape. The next year she captured a prize in the same exhibition. She has also exhibited in the Eastern art galleries.

In 1928 she made the news when she was swindled out of a diamond ring value $1,000 ($ in dollars).

She married Edgar J. Bissell in 1914, and had one son, William Edgar John Bissell (1916–1945), who committed suicide. She lived at 3016 Bartold Avenue, St. Louis, and died on November 9, 1944, in Maplewood, Missouri. She is buried at Bellefontaine Cemetery, St. Louis.

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