Although he received no real encouragement from his parents, Beach pursued his early education at the California School of Mechanical Arts, San Francisco. Immediately upon from graduating in 1899, he took a position with Shreve and Co., San Francisco, where he designed silver jewelry. However, he continued his art study by attending the Mark Hopkins Institute night classes in drawing from 1900 to 1902.
According to autobiographical notes among his papers, his mother would have liked to see his earnings go toward "a nice team of greys and a handsome." But Beach had other ideas. By the end of 1903, he had saved enough money to resign his position at Shreve and Co. and, with his former employer's best wishes and encouragement, go to New York to work and study. After about a year he moved on to Paris and, in May 1904, was granted an acceptance certificate to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. His major studies occured in Charles Raoul Verlet's atelier at the Acad‚mie Julian where he evidently progressed well, taking the gold medal in 1905. He continued to study with Verlet until 1906, but remained abroad about another year.
On his return to New York Beach quickly established himself as a perceptive modeler of allegorical and mythological figures. Between 1908 and 1910 he was elected to the National Sculpture Society, the Salmagundi Club, and the American Numismatic Society, as well as to the National Academy. In 1909 he established his studio in MacDougal Alley in Greenwich Village which he maintained until 1951.
Several realistic bronze and marble studies of laborers date from these years as does Great-Grandmother, a bust of Mehitable Waring Smith which the sculptor modeled from a photograph in his family's collection. This portrait of Beach's ancestor reflects a life-long interest in his family's genealogy.
In Paris in 1907, Beach had met Eleanor Hollis Murdock, an art and music student from Scarsdale, New York; they were married in 1910, and after a wedding trip through Europe, settled in Rome where he continued to work and study until 1912. At the end of that year, a retrospective exhibition of his work was held at the Macbeth Gallery in New York. A feature of the show were three portrait heads of children, a genre for which Beach would become well known.
On a more monumental level, the sculptor was commissioned in 1915 for three figural groups, Primitive, Medieval and Modern Progress, for the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. They garnered Beach an exposition silver medal.
Beach was also adept at the execution of coins and medals, many of which he exhibited at the Academy; in 1919 he designed a medal commemorating the Peace of Versailles and was awarded honors for the work by the American Numismatic Society. In portraiture, his best known works are several busts done for the New York University Hall of Fame beginning in the 1920s.
Beach was an active participant in the New York art world. He showed his work in Academy winter and annual exhibitions almost without exception from 1907 to 1926; he received the Helen Foster Barnett Prize in the 1909 Winter, and the Elizabeth N. Watrous Gold Medal in the 1926 Annual Exhibition. He served as president of the National Sculpture Society for the 1927-28 term, just before going to Rome to work for two years, having been granted a studio at the American Academy. For a period in the 1930s, he taught life and antique classes at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design in New York.
The most appropriate and concise summation of Beach's career might be comments written by Adeline Adams in 1929:
Mr. Beach is different again from most of his contemporaries, in that he is successful in his command over all the final materials in which a sculptor's work may be presented, whether terra-cotta, stone, or bronze. With a modern and highly interesting vision of beauty, and with an absolute understanding of the principles of sculpture, this artist respects both the art and the craft of sculpture. Sometimes it would seem that the finer the artist, the finer his appreciation of craftsmanship.
