A Midwesterner by birth, George Hamilton Beattie Jr. spent most of his adult years in Georgia. He was an educator who painted representational watercolors and a series of murals that became controversial some fifty years after they were installed.
Beattie was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and attended the Cleveland School of Art. During World War II, he served in the visual aids division of the United States Army Air Corps where he was assigned to draw maps and weather charts. For a time, he was stationed at Herbert Smart Airport in Macon, Georgia. After the war he moved to Atlanta where he taught at the High Museum School of Art until 1948, and for the next three years he was an instructor at the Atlanta College of Art. Subsequently, he spent a ten year period (1957–1967) as the chair of the creative drawing program at Georgia Institute of Technology’s school of architecture before becoming an instructor at Georgia State University from 1975 until 1981. He also served as director of the Georgia Commission for the Arts (now the Georgia Council for the Arts) and on the Atlanta Arts Council.
In 1956 Beattie received a Fulbright Scholarship which he used to travel to Italy, and four years later he traveled to Greece. The resulting body of work focuses on the ruins and architectural subjects which he described as an attempt “to express a sense of the luminous antiquity of the past as an undertone in the present appearance of ancient lands.”
Also in 1956 Beattie completed a series of eight murals for the Georgia Department of Agriculture’s building in downtown Atlanta which depicted the state’s agricultural history. Ultimately they became a source of controversy. He explained his point of view and depiction of certain subjects: “As a human being, I am vehemently opposed to slavery, as anyone should be, but it was a significant epoch in our history; it would have been inaccurate not to include this period.” One panel shows semi-nude native Americans—mostly women; in another scene slaves cultivate cotton in front of a conventional plantation house, while in a third muscular slaves cut and bundle sugar cane. When a newly elected commissioner of agriculture took office in 2011 he decided to remove the offending murals and had them placed at the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens.