Beal was an active member of the American art community and joined numerous organizations, including the Boston Art Club, the American Watercolor Society, and the Salmagundi Club, where he was awarded the Hurley Prize in 1902. He also helped establish the Society of Independent Artists and the New Society of Artists, a group of about fifty of the leading painters of the day, including Childe Hassam, Maurice Prendergast, and John Sloan. Beal held his first one-man show at the Clausen Gallery in New York City in 1905, and his second at Vose Galleries in 1916. He was elected an Associate Member of the National Academy of Design in 1909, and ten years later was honored to be one of a select group of American artists invited to exhibit at the Luxembourg Museum in Paris. Subsequent exhibitions, all well-attended and highly acclaimed, included displays at both the Milch and Kraushaar Galleries in New York City, and three solo shows after his death at Vose Galleries in 1973, 1975, and 1983. His work was included in exhibitions at the Corcoran Gallery, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the North Shore Arts Association, and today his paintings can be found in many museum collections, including the Metropolitan Museum, the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, and the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC.