Before there was a Taubman Museum of Art, or an Art Museum of Western Virginia, there was the Roanoke Fine Arts Center and Jim Yeatts.

The Princeton-educated architect and abstract painter, who died in 2005, was the center's unpaid director in the 1950s. The center was renamed the Art Museum of Western Virginia in 1992 and is now the Taubman Museum.

Yeatts, regarded by many as Roanoke's premier painter of the '50s and '60s, taught art at colleges and universities and gave lessons at the arts center for years. He is credited with nurturing a generation of painters.

"He was just the lifeblood of the art center," said his ex-wife, Lyn Yeatts.

Yeatts eventually gave up architecture and teaching to live in what friends described as near-poverty while painting full time. In later years, he became a recluse, living alone in a back-of-the-house apartment on Walnut Avenue.

Acquaintances sometimes saw him walking the sidewalks of Old Southwest Roanoke, looking Walt Whitmanesque with his long hair and flowing white beard.

"He really was the father of the art community," said artist Harriett Stokes, who took classes from Yeatts in the '50s. "He was the artist of the time. Mr. Artist."