This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  A painter married to another painter, Francis F. Brown, Beulah Brown
became a student of art in 1915, after graduating from the Cincinnati
Conservatory of Music and then spending two years teaching school in
Oolitic, Indiana. She had studied art briefly at the
Conservatory, but it was enough to stir her interest, and she enrolled
in the John Herron Art Institute where William Forsyth was her
teacher. She married Brown, a fellow student, three months after
meeting him, and after he graduated in 1916, the couple taught art in
Indiana towns of New Richmond and of Mitchell, where Beulah had spent
her childhood.
The Browns had four children, and Francis Brown joined the facultry of
Ball State Teachers College in Muncie. Beulah was able to
continue painting and earned money teaching, because her widowed mother
moved in with them and did most of the housework. In 1932, the
Browns added a large studio to their home, and Beulah and Francis often
worked there together. It was also a family gathering place, with
their children and friends playing there as well.
Beulah developed a special interest in fabric design, creating some
very bold, colorful, abstract patterns, and she drew upon her flower
garden for ideas. Also doing floral still lifes, she preferred
working in watercolor because she was alergic to oil paint. This
circumstance led her husband to paint in watercolor as well. In
December of 1949, she began to paint snowscenes, which became signature
work for her. Sales from these paintings also helped the family
income because Francis Brown had his painting career curtailed because
of glaucoma. In order to help him paint, she would arrange his
palette in a certain way with colors.
Francis Brown died in 1971, and Beulah continued painting in the studio
she had shared with him. She did a series of decorative naive
style paintings that were popular and that led to comparisons with
Grandma Moses. She resented the comparison because of her
sophisticated schooling and the fact that Grandma Moses was self taught.
Source:
Judith Vale Newton and Carol Ann Weiss, Skirting the Issue, pp.87-93
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