Smith was born and reared in Fort Worth. She studied under Christina McLean before attending the College of Industrial Arts (now Texas Woman’s University), Denton (1928 – 1929), and earning a bachelor of arts from the University of Oklahoma, Norman (1931), where she was a student of Leonard Good. During two summers, she studied at the Art Students League of New York (1956 – 1957) under Robert Brackman, and at various times she was a student of Mitchell Jamison, Frederic Taubes, and Bror Utter. A specialist in portraiture, Smith taught at the Fort Worth Arts Center (1959 – 1980) and during the summers in Taos, Ruidoso, and Las Vegas, New Mexico. In 1969 she taught portraiture at Texas Christian University, Fort worth. Following her death in a Fort Worth hospital after a heart attack, the university established an art scholarship in her name. Smith painted almost until the day of her death. Donald L. Weismann, professor emeritus in the arts at the University of Texas, Austin, wrote that Smith “discovered that her interests and artistic powers were centered in a concern for the beauty and charm of practical objects in specific situations of the natural world, from an individual flower to fields full of them, and from the face of a young child to the face of a mountain. With literally thousands of portraits to her credit, hundreds of landscapes and still lifes, with demonstrated mastery in a variety of medium, Emily Guthrie Smith still goes about life with an almost unbelievable humility. Information courtesy of the artist’s niece Gladys Walsh of San Antonio Texas.