Lilian Swann Saarinen

Lilian “Lily” Louisa Swann Saarinen (April 17, 1912, New York City – May 22, 1995, Cohasset, Massachusetts) was an American sculptor and artist. She was the first wife of Finnish-American architect and industrial designer Eero Saarinen, with whom she sometimes collaborated.

She was born in New York City to Dr. Arthur Wharton Swann and his wife Susan Ridley Sedgwick. Her father unexpectedly died in 1914, when Lily was age 2 and her sister Lucy was 4. She attended Miss Chapin's School in Manhattan, and spent her summers studying sculpture in Connecticut. She first seriously studied art at the Art Students League of New York with Alexander Archipenko, and later with Albert Stewart, Heinz Warneke, and Brenda Putnam. She moved to Michigan where she studied under Carl Milles at the Cranbrook Academy of Art.

She contributed illustrations to magazines such as Child Life, Interiors, and Portfolio: An Intercontinental Quarterly. In 1935 she illustrated a children's book for the Bronx Zoo, Picture Book Zoo. In 1946 she wrote and illustrated the children’s book Who Am I?

Early sculpture commissions included: 23 glazed terra cotta reliefs (most of animals) at the Crow Island School in Winnetka, Illinois, 1938, Eliel Saarinen, architect; reliefs at the U.S. post office in Carlisle, Kentucky; and a terra cotta relief, "Waiting for the Mail" (1941), at the U.S. post office in Bloomfield, Indiana (Missing as of 2016). She frequently supplied "ceramic embellishments" for her husband's architectural projects.

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