Greaves, Helen Constant (1882 – 1966)
Helen Greaves was born in 1882 in Brighton and passed away in Cala, the Transkei. Greaves studied at the
Brighton Art School, The Sussex’ women’s art club and Cert of Royal Drawing society. Although her early paintings
dealt with a variety of subjects and her work during her periods in England was inevitably of a different nature,
Constant Greaves was best known for her native studies. In the latter years of her career she concentrated
exclusively on depicting heads and half-length figures of members of the Bantu tribes.
Her paintings, though sedulously descriptive are less laboured in effect than many of the ethnological studies
which have figured so largely in South African Art.