Painter Helena Darmesteter (née Héléna Hartog) was born into a Jewish family in London, England in 1850. She studied painting under Gustave Courtois in Paris, where she met her husband Arsène Darmesteter, whom she married in 1877. She enjoyed a sucessful career as a portrait painter, exhibiting at the Royal Academy (1891 and 1894) and at the Parisian Exposition Universelle in 1900. She also showed works at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions in 1907 and 1908, and was a member of the Société des Artistes Français and of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, and two of her paintings were included in the Jewish Art and Antiquities exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London in 1927. Her portraits include engineer and mathematician Hertha Ayrton (1906), Vice-Chancellor of Leeds University and art patron Sir Michael Sadler (1906), and her younger brother, chemist Sir Philip J. Hartog. She died in Bath, England on 15 March 1940. Her work is in UK collections including Girton College, University of Cambridge, the University of Manchester, SOAS and Salford.