Helen Louise Beccard Niles
Helen Louise Beccard Niles was an American painter and printmaker. Her work was exhibited at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and regional galleries in St. Louis, Washington, D.C., and California. She received prizes from numerous art associations with which she was associated including the Oakland Art Association, and her prints and paintings entered public collections, including the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Baltimore Museum of Art. She produced works ranging from realist depictions of working-class life to later explorations of abstraction, color, and form.
Early life and education
Beccard was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on November 12, 1903, the eldest child of Lena Obermark Beccard and John Frederic Beccard, Jr.. She studied at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts between 1921 and 1924, and subsequently taught art for fifteen years at Mary Institute, a private academy affiliated with Washington University in St. Louis.During the 1930s, Beccard maintained a studio in St. Louis and joined the St. Louis Artists' Guild and later the American Artists Congress. She financed annual summer travels to destinations including New Orleans, Mexico, Europe, Colorado, and New England. While in Mexico she studied fresco painting, and in Colorado she produced lithographs printed at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. Sketches from her travels informed her paintings, many of which depicted African American subjects, street scenes in St. Louis, and Mississippi River riverboat scenes.
Later career
In 1939, Beccard accepted a teaching position at the Calhoun School, a progressive academy in Manhattan. That same year her oil painting Sleeping Fireman was exhibited at the New York World’s Fair.She lived initially in Greenwich Village and began signing her works “Helen Beccard Niles” after her 1942 marriage to Walter W. Niles, a naval officer during World War II. Her New York–period drawings and paintings often represented working-class street culture, including docks, factories, fairs, and immigrant neighborhoods.
After the war and the birth of their two children, the Niles family relocated to Washington, D.C., where Walter was employed by the RAND Corporation. During this period, Helen resumed painting and exhibited with the Society of Washington Artists, showing at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and other regional venues. Her style shifted from naturalism to more abstract forms.
In 1956, the family moved to the San Francisco Peninsula, where Helen took up printmaking and exhibited regularly at Gallery House in Palo Alto. She and Walter later lived in San Francisco and Oakland before settling on Russian Hill, where she continued to work until her death.
During the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s her work was exhibited at shows sponsored by the Richmond Art Center, the Oakland Art Association, and San Francisco Women Artists and often received awards and prizes, including the Janet Langmaid prize of the Oakland Art Association in 1984.