Helen Damrosch Tee-Van

As a young girl, Helen attended the Veltin School for Girls, where her father and aunt Clara Mannes taught music classes.[4] She dropped out of the school in 1909 when she was sixteen, opting to continue her art education on her terms. During this time, she regularly accompanied a group of students to an anatomy class at Colombia Medical School.[6] For many years she was a member of Jonas Lie's Memory Sketch Club, and she regularly studied under painter George de Forest Brush.[7] In 1916, she attended a lecture given by Nobel Prize-winning poet Rabindranath Tagore on his first world tour.[8][9] Helen returned to school again much later in life, graduating from the New York School of Display Design in 1937.

Soon after beginning work with the New York Zoological Society, Helen met apprentice zookeeper and ichthyologist John Tee-Van. The couple was married the following year on July 17, 1923, and regularly traveled on scientific expeditions as a pair.[7] John worked his way up the ladder at the Bronx Zoo from apprentice to General Director, eventually holding the top position at the zoo for 10 years. John Tee-Van died in 1967 following a stroke, and Helen never remarried.[10]

In the acknowledgments of her first book written in 1926, Helen cheekily wrote of her ichthyologist husband: "To John Tee-Van, my husband, who has helped in many ways, and has even kept me from such grievous mistakes as putting a forest dragonfly into a picture of an open jungle clearing."[11]

At various points throughout her life, Helen was an active member of numerous social groups including the Cosmopolitan Club of New York City, the Society of Animal Artists, the New York Zoological Society, the American Ornithologists' Union, and the China Institute. She was especially involved in the Society of Women Geographers, serving as Vice President and Chair of the New York chapter from 1945 to 1948. She was an official member of the organization from 1934 until 1976.[12]

Helen Damrosch Tee-Van died on July 29, 1976, in a hospital in Danbury, Connecticut when she was 83. She is buried where she spent her retirement, in the town of Sherman, Connecticut.[13]

Helen began working with the Department of Tropical Research of the Wildlife Conservation Society in 1922. Unique for the time, the Department was noted for employing numerous women illustrators and scientists to work on their expeditions. Others employed by the Society at the time included Jocelyn Crane, Gloria Hollister, Harriet Bennett Strandberg, Else Bostelmann, Dwight Franklin, Laura Schlageter, Isabel Cooper Mahaffie, and Ezra Winter.[15] Ruth Rose and Mabel Satterlee also joined them, working as a household manager and a general assistant respectively.[16] Her team of colleagues was unconventional and known for enjoying costume parties and music nights. During two world wars and the Great Depression, Theodore Roosevelt commented that they were fortunate to enjoy their jobs.[17] In a February 20, 1927 article from The Literary Digest detailing the "many odd jobs" held by women, the following was written about Helen.[18]

Tinamou, watercolor, Guyana, c. 1922

"Under the sea, Mrs. Helen Damrosch Tee-Van, niece of the famous Conductor Damrosch, finds the subjects she prefers to paint. On excursions with Dr. William Beebe, she paints submarine flora and fauna for scientific record. She feels so at home down below that once she dropped a pencil and reached down for it, only to find it falling up. She had to return to the surface for another. Miss Tee-Van has said the Sargossa, written and illustrated a book about South America, and many of her deep-sea designs are on exhibition in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York."

— "Ingenious Women", The Literary Digest

As a scientific illustrator who specialized in animal illustration, Helen accompanied the Department of Tropical Research on thirteen international expeditions under the authority of biologist William Beebe. In 1925, she was one of four women on the Arcturus expedition, along with Ruth Rose, Isabel Cooper, Lillian Segal, and Marie Poland Fish.[19] While on a trip to Haiti in 1927 she became one of the first women to deep-sea dive, wearing a 60-pound diving helmet to make underwater sketches of oceanic organisms on zinc plates.[20][21] The University of Oregon's archives contains her sketchbooks from British Guiana and Bermuda.[7] Helen Damrosch Tee-Van's expedition résumé included trips to the following locations:

• 1922, 1924: British Guiana
• 1925: Arcturus Oceanographic Expedition (Sargasso Sea to the Galapagos)
• 1927: Haiti
• 1929 – 1933: Bermuda Oceanographic Expeditions
• 1946: Henri Pittier National Park, Venezuela
• 1956, 1960, 1963: Trinidad

Helen returned to school as an adult, graduating from the New York School of Display Design in 1937. Both the following year as well as in 1939, she was commissioned to create background murals for exhibits at the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The Berkshire Museum celebrated its 50th anniversary in 1953 with a lengthy article in the Berkshire Eagle that detailed what were considered the highlights of the museum, including the series of murals completed by Tee-Van, titled The Story of Life.[22] An article written by a curator at the Berkshire Museum and published several years later in the same newspaper echoed a similar sentiment, encouraging visitors to the museum to view Helen's murals on the walls of the Biology room.[23] The mural series was conceived by the director of the museum, Laura M. Bragg, who worked closely with Helen for weeks to fulfill her educational vision.[6]

From 1941 to 1942 and again in 1949, Helen created murals for the backgrounds of animal exhibits at the Bronx Zoo.[7] She also made the background mural for the New York Zoological Society's building at the 1939 World's Fair.[24] Between 1943 and 1947, Helen Damrosch Tee-Van created sixteen educational dioramas for the United Service to China, a group of eight American organizations that sought to fundraise for China and foster relationships between individuals of the two nations.[7][25]

For several months in 2017, the Drawing Center in Manhattan mounted an exhibition titled Exploratory Works: Drawings from the Department of Tropical Research Field Expeditions that included works by Helen Damrosch Tee-Van.[26] The exhibit was the first time many of the original illustrations had ever been shown to the public, but it also presented a complex legacy of scientific research, racism, and colonialism.[27]

Decades after she initially drew them, many of Tee-Van's illustrations are now scrutinized for her handling of race. For example, a large map she illustrated of Bermuda's Nonsuch Island while on expedition was featured in the aforementioned 2017 exhibition due to her casual inclusion of several racist, stereotypical caricatures.[28]

Helen Damrosch Tee-Van's first original book, Red Howling Monkey: The Tale of a South American Indian Boy, was published by MacMillan Company in 1926.[11] The book was quickly popular among children and parents, earning a glowing review from a journal published by the National Council of Teachers of English called The Elementary English Review.[30] The final three of Helen's four children's books, those written and illustrated in the 1960s, were storybooks that doubled as flora and fauna guides for young explorers. Helen died while working on her final book, leaving her manuscript for Nature's Protection of the Animal Kingdom permanently unpublished.[7] A complete list of original books written and illustrated by Helen Damrosch Tee-Van includes:

• Red Howling Monkey: The Tale of a South American Indian Boy, 1926.[11]
• The Trees Around Us, 1960.
• Insects Are Where You Find Them, 1963.[31]
• Small Animals Are Where You Find Them, 1966.[32]
• Nature's Protection of the Animal Kingdom, unpublished.