Helen Barbara Howard RCA (March 10, 1926 – December 7, 2002) was a Canadian painter, wood-engraver, drafter, bookbinder and designer who produced work consistently throughout her life, from her graduation in 1951 from the Ontario College of Art until her unexpected death in 2002.

Her work is represented in many permanent collections, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the British Library, the Bodleian Library in Oxford, United Kingdom and The Library of Congress in Washington. Her work also hangs in private, public and corporate collections in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Howard was born in Long Branch, Ontario, in 1926, the younger of two children. Her father, Thomas Howard, a secondary school teacher, was an English immigrant. Her mother, Helen Mackintosh, who was born in Winnipeg, was of Scottish ancestry. Having decided early to become an artist, Howard studied at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto from 1948 to 1951, where she was a pupil of Will Ogilvie, who taught her figure drawing, and Jock Macdonald, who taught her painting and composition. In her final year she won the silver medal in drawing and painting.

Howard taught art classes in Toronto until 1953, when she moved to London in the UK, where she studied at Saint Martin's School of Art, immersing herself in the English landscape and the cultural life of postwar London. She also travelled to Europe to visit the art museums of Rome, Venice, Florence, Paris and Madrid, and saw the Paleolithic cave paintings at Lascaux in southwestern France, an experience which influenced many of her later illustrations. In London she met her future husband, the Canadian poet, Richard Outram. Returning to Canada in 1956, Howard and Outram made their home in Toronto for the next 46 years.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Howard showed regularly at the Picture Loan Society, a Toronto gallery established by Douglas Duncan in 1936 to present the work of contemporary Canadian artists such as Emily Carr, Fred Varley, David Milne, Lawren Harris, and A.Y. Jackson. Several Canadian public collections possess Howard drawings and paintings acquired through the Douglas Duncan estate, as Duncan was also a collector of her work.

In 2002, Howard and Outram moved to Port Hope, Ontario, but soon after their arrival Howard fell and broke her hip. While undergoing surgery on December 7 in Peterborough, Ontario, she suffered a pulmonary embolism and died on the operating table.

Howard and her husband were part of a circle of artists, writers and designers who were interested in visual images, in language and in the book arts. One close associate was the graphic designer Allan Fleming, whose Martlet Press published Twenty-Eight Drawings by Barbara Howard in 1970, a period when she was drawing the figure. The Canadian wood engraver Rosemary Kilbourn, a close friend since art college, taught Howard to carve images that could be printed in conjunction with text.

In 1960, Howard and Outram launched the Gauntlet Press, a small private press which produced hand-bound letterpress volumes of Outram's poetry and Howard's wood engravings. These limited editions, prized by collectors, can also be found in such public collections as Library and Archives Canada, the Library of Congress, the British Library and the University of Toronto Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the Gauntlet Press also issued a series of letterpress broadsheets of Outram's poems, all of them designed (and many illustrated) by Howard. Digital facsimiles of the books and broadsheets of the Gauntlet Press in the collection of the Memorial University of Newfoundland can be viewed at the website dedicated to The Gauntlet Press of Richard Outram and Barbara Howard, together with extensive background material and an exhaustive bibliography.