Helen Sawyer was born in Washington, D.C. in 1900 and began an early formal art education with her father, the painter Wells Moses Sawyer. She later studied at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League in New York City, as well as with Charles Webster Hawthorne in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Sawyer’s deeply intimate paintings in oil and watercolor demonstrate the influence of impressionism, while their depictions of isolation, loneliness, and remoteness are often bold expressions of spirituality and ceaseless human striving.