Born in Ottawa. Served in the Royal Canadian Navy during WWI. He was a landscape, figure and marine painter and printmaker using a decorative, realistic style. Harold Beament studied law but also attended the Ontario College of Art in 1922 where he trained under J.W Beatty. Beament settle in Montreal, where he was a graphic designer, teacher and commander of a division of RVMRC in peacetime.

He developed a style of decorative realism in his painting and taught at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art. He received the Jessie Dow Prize in 1935 at the Montreal Spring Exhibition. He enlisted again in 1939 and from 1943 to 1947, he was an official war artist. He became an associate of the Royal Canadian Academy in 1936 and full member in 1947. He served as president of the RCA from 1964 to 1967.

Harold Beament travelled extensively, including the Arctic, and studied the Baffin Island Eskimos. In 1955, Beament designed a ten-cent stamps with an eskimo figure. He worked in oil, watercolour, charcoal and lithography.

Later, he made Eskimo lithographs for the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal. His work hangs in the National Gallery of Canada, The Dominion Archives, The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, The Museum of the province of Quebec, the Seagram collection and elsewhere. He lived in Montreal, Quebec until his death in 1984.