Helen Drake Muirhead was former Design Review Board member, artist who exhibited paintings across county

Tiburon artist Helen Drake Muirhead, whose paintings captured local fauna, native flora and Marin landscapes, died of ongoing health complications Aug. 15 at MarinHealth Medical Center in Greenbrae. She was 88.

Muirhead showed her oil and watercolor work throughout Marin, including in exhibits at Tiburon Town Hall, Dominican University and the Corte Madera Library, where she held a show with her great-grandson. She was also a dedicated art teacher, regularly teaching classes at the Belvedere-Tiburon Landmarks Society’s Art & Garden Center.

Muirhead served on the Design Review Board from June 1975 to June 1979 and was a longtime supporter of the Belvedere-Tiburon Landmarks Society, with Executive Director Patty Flax noting Muirhead often sold her paintings at the Landmarks Society’s annual fundraising Holiday Art & Craft Sale.

“She was gracious, beautiful and kind, and her presence was always welcome,” Flax said.

Heritage and Arts Commissioner Jaleh Etemad recalled enlisting Muirhead to teach multiple art workshops when Etemad was serving as Tiburon’s artist laureate. She called Muirhead a “very talented” artist.

“She had a very calm personality, like the flowers that she painted,” Etemad said.

Muirhead was born Helen Drake on Nov. 5, 1935, in Washington, D.C., to Illinois-born attorney Robert Drake and Kansas-born teacher Martha Swan. She was the second of three children, born between older sister Janet and younger brother Thomas, according to 1940 U.S. Census records on FamilySearch. Muirhead adopted her mother’s maiden name, Swan, as her middle name in high school, daughter Sarah Sanford said.

Growing up, Muirhead split her time between the North Shore suburbs of Chicago and Moscow, Idaho. She graduated from the Cambridge School of Weston, a boarding school in the Boston suburbs, and went on to earn a bachelor’s in philosophy and religion from Mills College in Oakland, which has since merged with Boston-based Northeastern University. While at the school, she took several art history classes.

“She always loved art,” Sanford said. “But she knew that would be too easy, so she chose something more challenging as her major.” Muirhead also attended the San Francisco Art Institute, where she studied oil painting.

In 1955, during her first year at Mills, Muirhead married John Sanford, a nephew of Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway. The couple moved to Tiburon in 1961 and had three children together, Eric, Walter and Sarah, before divorcing around 1980. John Sanford died in 2016.

Except for a three-year stint between 1969 and 1972, when she and her family lived in Mexico City for John Sanford’s work as an executive at Wells Fargo & Co., Muirhead was a Tiburon resident for the rest of her life, living on Paradise Drive at the time of her death.

Tiburon resident and former Mayor Andrew Thompson said he knew Muirhead since he was a child. He befriended Walter in kindergarten, and they both now live in their childhood homes.

“Helen was so kind and gracious and thoughtful,” Thompson said. “And it’s no wonder that she raised a beautiful and loving family.”

When Thompson was growing up, his father was diagnosed with and eventually died of ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. He said during that time, Muirhead and her family included him in family outings, such as ski trips.

“They really made me a part of their family, which was incredibly healing for me,” Thompson said, adding that he will miss Muirhead “terribly.”

She married ophthalmologist Fraser Muirhead in 1983, and they remained married until her death. Fraser had a passion for photography, and the couple held a joint exhibit of her paintings and his photographs at Dominican University in 2012.

“Helen has a good eye,” Fraser Muirhead said in a 2012 Ark article. “She helps me with cropping — and is always right.” Muirhead in an email also said his wife was charming, “graceful, courteous, intelligent, analytic” and civic-minded.

Sanford said the couple both enjoyed plants, as both were members of the California Native Plant Society, with Fraser once serving as president of the society’s Marin chapter.

Muirhead started out as a landscape painter but eventually began painting flowers more, favoring watercolors because they “lent themselves to detailed plant studies,” she said in the 2012 Ark article.

“The shapes and colors are irresistible, far more varied than anything I could imagine,” she said. “In a plant, I see how awesome life is. I would like to convey that in my work.”

She continued to paint landscapes, from hillsides to views of the Golden Gate Bridge and sailboats in the San Francisco Bay, and wildlife, including birds like egrets and turkeys.

Sanford said her mother loved to talk about how painting was a way for her to observe the world around her, adding that her mother felt there were details not seen until they were documented.

“There was not, say, negative feelings in them, like anger or rage or anything like that,” she said of her mother’s work. “But there was sentimentality in some of them.”

Muirhead enjoyed being an art teacher, as well, Sanford said, adding she taught workshops in San Francisco, Marin and Tiburon schools after Proposition 13 passed in 1978 and many schools across California lost funding for such programs.

Etemad said Muirhead was more than happy to teach workshops locally to adults, as well, adding that she loved to talk about how to paint her signature flowers.

“She was very willing and full of energy toward them, and really teaching them every little thing,” Etemad said of Muirhead’s work with her students.

In addition to being an artist and teacher, Sanford said, Muirhead was an attentive and supportive mother, encouraging Sanford’s own artistic talents. She said Muirhead gave her bright orange oil paint from the 1960s that Sanford uses in many of her own paintings.

She recalled when the two spoke on the phone, Muirhead would stay on until Sanford was ready to end the call. Her mother was also an excellent gift giver and a creative birthday-party organizer, she said.

Whether Sanford was having trouble figuring out how to finish a painting or needed parenting advice, she said her mother was there to offer help but also knew how be unobtrusive.

She displayed a kindness toward everyone she met, Sanford set.

“She really made everybody feel seen and really, really loved,” Sanford said.

After Muirhead died, Sanford said, she, her stepfather, stepsiblings and brothers held a gathering, and she observed everyone there “had a really special connection” with her mother and felt “she was their person.”

“How can a person be that for so many people?” Sanford said. “But she was able to do it, and nobody felt jealous of the others. It was just such a lovely way to be in the world.”

Muirhead is survived by husband Fraser Muirhead; her three children from her first marriage, Eric Sanford of Santa Cruz, Walter Sanford of Tiburon and Sarah Sanford of Seattle; her three stepchildren from her second marriage, Heather Thrower of El Cerrito and Krista Muirhead and Robert Muirhead, both of San Rafael; sister Janet Morris of Santa Rosa; 10 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

She was preceded in death by her parents; her former husband, John Sanford; and her brother, Thomas Drake.

A memorial service had not been scheduled by The Ark’s press deadline.

Donations in Muirhead’s name can be made to the Belvedere-Tiburon Landmarks Society or to the American Civil Liberties Union.

Reach Tiburon reporter Francisco Martinez at 415-944-4634.

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