Gamaliel Waldo Beaman

Beaman was born into a poor farming family in Westminster, Massachusetts. As a young man he moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he became a landscape painter. He worked in oils and watercolors and took drawing classes at the Lowell Institute. In his early twenties he traveled and painted in the White Mountains and in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. In 1878 and 1879 he studied in Paris and Pont-Aven, France, earning his passage by escorting the daughter of a rich cousin and her mother (he returned home on a cattle boat).^[1][2][3]

Upon his return, Beaman established a studio on Tremont Street in Boston. During this period, he frequently traveled to Northfield, Massachusetts, where he painted in and around the Connecticut Valley. There he received commissions from evangelist Dwight Lyman Moody. It was there that he also met and married Mary Priest Stearns on October 22, 1885. Mary died of consumption shortly after the birth of their second child, and in 1894 Beaman married his second wife, Eileen Marie Rand Sherman of North Adams, Massachusetts. Following their marriage, the artist and his wife maintained a residence and studio in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts. In 1898, the Beamans returned to north central Massachusetts and bought a home in Princeton. In his later years, his sight began to fail and he supplemented his income by operating an early Americana shop, earning him the nickname "Antique Beaman."^[1][2][3] Neighbors characterized him as increasingly irascible in his old age. He died at the age of 84 and was interred in the Whitmansville cemetery in Westminster.^[4]