The State House is full of dead white guys. Even worse, it’s full of dead, white politician and lawyer guys.

That’s not a cynical assessment of the current Legislature, but an inventory of the 90 portraits that adorn Maine’s most important public building. Eighty-eight pale males and just two women. No Indians, no blacks, no Franco-Americans.

That’s unacceptable, but, fortunately, it’s about to change. A commission — the splendidly named Maine Commission on Outstanding Citizens — is proposing 20 new portraits, a diverse lineup that, according to Rep. William Lemke, historian and chairman of the commission, “better reflects the state’s history.”

And the list of Mainers and those with strong Maine ties is impressive: Dorothea Dix of Hampden, champion of reform in mental institutions and prisons, and director of nursing for the Union during the Civil War; James Augustine Healy, Portland’s second Catholic bishop and the first black bishop in the United States; women of letters Sarah Orne Jewett, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Harriet Beecher Stowe; abolitionist newspaperman Elijah Lovejoy of Albion, murdered by a pro-slavery mob in Illinois in 1837; Charles Best of West Pembroke, co-discoverer of insulin; Motion picture director John Ford; Cornelia “Flyrod” Crosby, the first Registered Maine Guide and a pal of Annie Oakley and Buffalo Bill Cody.

Colorful and diverse, but still lacking. Between Samuel de Champlain and Rudy Vallee there are no French-rooted nominees on the list. Surely the ethnic group that makes up one-third of the state’s population produced someone in the intervening three centuries worthy of inclusion.

Baseballer Louis Sockalexis is on the list. The Penobscot who made it to the big leagues belongs, but Maine’s original inhabitants deserve better. How about, just for starters, one of the many Passamaquoddys who served this country in the world wars, who fought but could not vote?

The commission has done well in getting this project off the ground, but the proposal needs adjustment. That should happen when it gets to the Legislature, which must approve the list and appropriate money for the purchase or commissioning of new portraits. Before anything is carved in stone — or, in this case, painted in oil — Maine’s French and Indian heritage should be better represented.

Most of those 90 existing portraits are, of course, governors. That Maine has produced such a long line of chief executives that share hue and gender isn’t anyone’s fault, it’s history. And gubernatorial visages are standard fare in capitols throughout the land.

But the Maine State House is a big place and the ongoing major restoration should open up a lot of freshly painted wall space for more portraits. The dead white guys who led the state politically should have their gallery, but let’s make room for the real Maine.