A Franco-American realist painter

Helena Leigh-Hunt (1931–1995) was a Franco-American realist painter known for her luminous gouache still lifes, intricate compositions, and meticulously crafted paintings of everyday objects. Born in Paris to a French mother and an American father, Leigh-Hunt studied at the American Academy of Art in San Francisco, the Art Students League in New York and the Academie Julian in Paris. In 1971, she met the Russian painter Mihail Chemiakine, becoming his collaborator and trusted technician for over two decades. 

Leigh-Hunt worked primarily in gouache, a medium whose matte opacity suited her precise, jewel-like surfaces. She is celebrated for her “torchons” (paintings of folded dishtowels), her poised still lifes of bottles, pitchers, newspaper fragments, flowers, and vegetables, and her striking studies of the crumpled American flag, painted with intense, vibrating color. Critics have compared her approach to the austere classicism of Giorgio Morandi, and to the lineage of Chardin. Her paintings, intimate, balanced, and intense, reveal a classical devotion to drawing. Leigh-Hunt exhibited in the United States and France, including showings of her work in Paris, New York, Sag Harbor NY and Connecticut. She lived her later years in Sag Harbor, New York, where she continued to paint until her death in 1995.