"Helen Damrosch Tee-Van, artist, illustrator and author, was born in
New York City in 1893. She attended Veltin School in New
York. In 1909 she dropped out of Veltin School, but
continued her art education. She studied with George de Forest Brush,
attended an anatomy class at the Columbia Medical
School with a group of artists, and belonged to Jonas Lie's Memory
Sketch
Club for several years. Many memory sketches, made
from notes or rough sketches in New York, are included in sketch books
in the Collection.
Mrs. Tee-Van was an artist on 13 expeditions of the
Tropical Research Department of the New York Zoological Society, under
the direction of William Beebe. She was sent to
British Guiana in 1922. In 1923 she married John Tee-Van and returned to
British
Guiana the next year. She participated in the
Arcturus Oceanographic Expedition, 1925; Haiti, 1927, where she made
underwater
sketches with e lead pencil on zinc plates while
wearing a 60 pound glass helmut at a depth of 60 feet; the Bermuda
Oceanographic
Expeditions, 1929-1933; Rancho Grande, Venezuela,
1946; and was a guest artist in "Simla," Trinidad, in 1956, 1960 and
1963.
Drawings from both the British Guiana expeditions
and the Bermuda expedition are included in the Collection.
In 1937 Mrs. Tee-Van graduated from the New York
School of Display. Between 1943 and 1947 she designed 16 educational
dioramas
for United Service to
China. She created murals for the Berkshire
Museum, Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in 1938 and 1939, and for the Bronx
Park
Zoo in 1941-1942 and 1949. She made the background
for exhibits in the New York Zoological Society's building in the
1939-1940
World's Fair. She has also designed textiles. "