Beulah H. Brown

Beulah Elizabeth Hazelrigg Brown (November 24, 1892 – March 26, 1987) was a Hoosier painter, educator, and textile designer who is best known for her bold, colorful, abstract patterns for fabrics, as well as figure, genre, landscapes, and floral still-life paintings in watercolor, her preferred media. Winter snow scenes, which she began painting in 1949, were another of her specialties. She also made decorative naïve paintings in her later years.

Born in Napoleon, Indiana, and a longtime resident of Muncie, Indiana, where she maintained an art studio in her home, Brown graduated from the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music in 1913 and trained in art at the John Herron Art Institute in 1915–16 with William Forsyth, an art educator and a Hoosier Group member of Impressionist painters. Brown also taught in several schools in Indiana and became supervisor of occupational therapy and a teacher of art and music at the New Castle State Hospital in New Castle, Indiana. She was married to Francis Focer Brown, an American Impressionist painter and a professor and director of Ball State University's Fine Art Department from 1925 to 1957 and also a former student of Forsyth.