Emily Muir

Emily Lansingh Muir, the first woman to serve on the Commission of Fine Arts, was a painter who drew her inspiration from the life and landscape of coastal Maine. She attended Vassar College and studied painting at the Art Students League in New York with Richard Lahey. In 1939 she and her husband, the sculptor William Muir, moved to Stonington, Maine, where she established her studio and worked for more than sixty years. She was also an accomplished designer of houses, building more than forty on Deer Isle in Maine. Muir’s paintings are in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Portland Museum of Art, the University of Maine, and the Farnsworth Art Museum as well as many private collections. She served on the Advisory Committee for the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and was also a member of the Maine Coastal Heritage Trust, the Stonington Town Planning Board, and the Portland Society of Art. The papers of William and Emily Muir are located in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.