Elisabeth Beattie

Beattie, Elisabeth,

Elisabeth Morton Watts Beattie, devoted artist, educator, daughter, wife, mother and grandmother, died from end-stage dementia on Monday, November 30, 2015 at Norton Brownsboro Hospital in Louisville. She was 98.

Beattie, born in Montgomery City, Missouri, to William Winthrop Watts and Ivy (Iva) Frank Hensley on March 1, 1917 grew up relishing tales of her family heritage that took her immigrant ancestors from the British Isles to Virginia, Kentucky and Missouri. Among her forbearers was her pioneering great-great uncle, Daniel Boone, brother to her great-great grandfather, George Boone.

Baby Girl, as everyone in the rural community in which she was raised by her enterprising widowed mother called her, displayed an early passion for painting and dancing and won numerous awards for competitions in both. She reasoned that an art career would outlast a life in dance and so majored in art at Missouri's Central Methodist College, from which she graduated in 1939. After a several-year stint of teaching art and English and finally supervising all public junior-high school-level art instruction in Jennings, Missouri, Beattie entered graduate school at the University of Iowa where she studied painting with Philip Guston and graduated with a Master's of Art in 1945, the year she began teaching painting at Lindenwood College in St. Charles, Missouri; studying painting with Ben Shahn in Colorado and winning first-place awards for her work and exhibiting in one-woman shows across the country.

Beattie served as chair of the college's art department until 1952, the year in which she met and married her husband, Walter M. Beattie, Jr., at a statewide marriage conference held at Lindenwood. She spoke as the career woman for whom marriage was not her sole life's goal and he spoke as the sociology professor commenting on the role of marriage in the family.

Although Beattie continued to paint, her focus shifted from career to family. During her married life she lived in Wisconsin, Missouri, Maryland, New York, Puerto Rico and Kentucky, and, briefly, in Hawaii and the Virgin Islands, just as she traveled extensively throughout the world with her husband and children, providing them with private art history tours. In each of her residences she expressed gratitude for what became her 78-year membership in the international women's education sorority P.E.O., an organization in which she made close friends and in which she served in such leadership positions as chapter president in Bethesda, Maryland, and Syracuse, New York.

Beattie was preceded in death by her husband of 55 years, Walter Matthew Beattie, Jr. and her brother, William (Bill) Watts. She is survived by her daughter, Linda Elisabeth Beattie (Dominic); her son, Robert (Bob) Watts Beattie (Luci); her granddaughter, Lauren Elisabeth Beattie; her grandson, Brian Matthew Beattie; one niece; three nephews and numerous great-nieces and nephews. She will be remembered by family and friends as a caring, creative and conscientious woman who always put others' needs above her own.

Beattie's family will celebrate her life at a private event at Spalding University. In lieu of flowers, donations in memory of Elisabeth Beattie may be made in the name of her grandson, Brian Beattie, and sent to the Academy of Saint Adalbert in care of Mrs. Paula Stepanski, 56 Adalbert Street, Berea, Ohio 44017.