After emigrating from England, Beard spent the majority of his life running the Cooperative Mercantile in the town of Coalville in Summit County, Utah.

Before Beard's birth, his father, mother, and oldest brother found the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and were baptized.

The family decided to immigrate to the American West alongside many other LDS Europeans, and George embarked from Liverpool on June 20, 1868, for New York City with his mother and two of his sisters Mary Ann and Elizabeth.

[1] Two weeks from the end of this journey, Beard's mother took a fall aboard the ship and sustained fatal injuries.

[1] Upon their arrival in New York City, the Beard children boarded a train to Wyoming where they joined a company of travelers heading to Utah.

[7] While traveling to Utah in 1868, Beard and his siblings made a stop at Niagara Falls, which was incredibly influential later on in his artwork.

[2] His style is described at as Romantic, which is shown through the dramatic proportions meant to show emotion in his landscape paintings of the Uintas Mountains.

[9] Ehren Clark, writing at 15 Bytes, described his paintings, along with his photographs, as having "that spirit of divinity of the unforeseeable in nature".

[7] Beard informally studied photography under Charles R. Savage, a prominent landscape photographer in Utah at the time.

[2] One year before his death, Ralph B. Jordan wrote that "George Beard, of Coalville, is a man the world should know" when describing his life and career as an artist.

[13] Following his death, glass plate negatives of his photographs were donated to the L. Tom Perry Special Collections at Brigham Young University to be displayed.

[3] From March to June 2017, Beard's great-great nephew Norm Thurston commissioned an exhibit curated by Herman du Toit at the Springville Art Museum.