Stuempfig, who spent most of his life in the Philadelphia area, studied in that city at the University of Pennsylvania, and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, from 1931 to 1934. The Pennsylvania Academy awarded him a Cresson Traveling Scholarship in 1933. He was later a professor of composition at the Pennsylvania Academy where he taught for over twenty years. He married the artist Lila Agnes Kennedy Hill in 1935. His first solo exhibition occurred in New York in 1943. He was known as a painter of romantic, sometimes melancholy, landscapes, and, later in his career, of still lifes and cityscapes.
At the National Academy, Stuempfig won the Altman Prize in 1952 and in 1953; the Obrig Prize in 1956; the Morse Medal in 1962; and the Maynard Prize in 1963. He was a member the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
