Colette Pope Heldner (American 1902-1990)

Colette Pope Heldner was married to the noted Swedish-born artist Knute Heldner (1877-1952). He had been established in Duluth, Minnesota, before they settled in New Orleans in 1923, residing on St Peters Street in the French Quarter (Vieux Carre).

She was known for her impressionist style, painting scenes of the city's picturesque courtyards and favorite haunts of the local artists and musicians, plus darker atmospheric landscapes of the surrounding countryside, sometimes with figures included but not predominant. A number of her works bore the title "Swamp Idyl - Louisiana Bayou Country" but were varied in content, some with a small dwelling or boat or dock, others composed only of cypress trees in the waters of a bayou. These are not numbered or dated. Besides her full three-name signature, some early works were signed only "by Colette".

Colette Pope Heldner has received renewed critical acclaim in recent years, in such retrospecive exhibitions as "In a New Light: America's Brush with Impressionism", held March through May 2005 at the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, Georgia, -- where her work was included with that of about thirty luminaries such as Wm J Glackens, Wm Merritt Chase, and Ernest Lawson. A number of public and private collections own works of hers, including the LSU Museum of Art, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Mr. and Mrs. Amon Carter Evans Collection in Columbia, Tennessee, and others.