Helen M. Knowlton was an American artist, art instructor and author. She taught in Boston from 1871 until the mid-1910s, when she was in her 70s. Her instructor and later employer, William Morris Hunt, was the subject of a portrait she made and several books; She is considered his principal biographer.
Early life
Helen Mary Knowlton was born on August 16, 1832 in Littleton, Massachusetts, the second of nine children born to J.S.C and Anna W. Knowlton. She was raised in Worcester, Massachusetts and attended private and public schools. Beginning in 1834, her father owned and ran the Worcester Palladium. He died in 1871 and after that the three Knowlton sisters ran the paper for a number of years. For four years, beginning in 1865, she gave guitar lessons.
Education
She studied under the supervision of artist and teacher William Morris Hunt, who had an "experimental approach" towards art, starting in 1868. Hunt began classes for women after she let him know of 40 women interested in studying art. In the 1880s she studied under Frank Duveneck in Munich, Germany. In the summer of 1881 Knowlton was Duveneck's student in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he held art classes "between trips to Europe." She wrote later of the time, having said "East Gloucester was never so full of artists, and was getting to be called the Brittany of America." In 1881 and 1882, Knowlton traveled through Italy, France, Belgium and the Netherlands with Ellen Day Hale, who was her student in 1874; also along for part of the journey was Hale's distant cousin, the painter Margaret Lesley Bush-Brown.
Art career
In Boston, Knowlton was a painter, educator, author, and art critic for the Boston Post and another paper in Boston. She was a painter, art critic, and teacher into her 70s, about mid-1910s.
Knowlton, who had been William Morris Hunt's student, took over the drawing and painting class for Hunt in 1871, which she taught for four years. Starting in the summer of 1877 a studio in Magnolia was used for the class. One of her students was painter Ellen Day Hale; another was portraitist Marie Danforth Page. Upon Hunt's death, Knowlton was a contributor a fund for a dedicated room of his works in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She also helped to coordinate a retrospective of his work in Boston at the Museum of Fine Arts and was his "principal biographer." She taught until about the mid-1910s, when she was in her 70s.
Later years and death
In 1910 her sisters Francis, a drawing and painting teacher, and Lucy, a music teacher, lived with her on Pickering Street in Needham, Massachusetts. She died at 85 years of age on May 5, 1918 in Needham, Massachusetts. She is buried in Worcester at the Rural Cemetery.
