Helena Adamoff (1906–1995) was a Moscow-born painter who settled in Paris and became associated with naïve art in France. Her oils take their subjects from familiar places and occasions, from a public garden to a wedding day. In Jardin public (1959), figures gather in a garden before a row of brightly colored buildings. The building façades give the scene its rhythm, while the small figures draw attention to what is happening at ground level.

Adamoff’s paintings invite the eye to move between the setting and the people within it. In Retour au château, bare trees, a stone bridge, and scattered figures give a winter landscape the character of an inhabited place. The quiet of that scene suggests the range of an artist who also took up communal celebrations in works such as Le jour de mariage (1970).

The Musée d’Art moderne de Paris acquired Adamoff’s oil painting L’été, dated circa 1963, in 1964. She also appears under the name Hélène Adamoff in the Lexikon der Laienmaler aus aller Welt, an international reference work on naïve painters.