Dunbar Dyson Beck became a muralist, interior designer, painter and art educator. His work included a gold-leaf mural decoration for the band on a Steinway Grand Piano, which Theodore Steinway gifted to President Theodore Roosevelt. The piano remains in the East Room of the White House.

Beck was born in Delaware, Ohio and was educated at Ohio Wesleyan University; Northwestern University; and Yale University where he received his BFA. He entered the American Academy in Rome national competition in painting during his last year at Yale. He won the Prix de Rome, which allowed him to study master painters of Europe, as well as travel extensively and study traditional the arts and cultures of several European countries.

He became a teacher at Yale University and later worked as an interior decorator and architectural designer. In the 1930s and 1940s, Beck went back and forth between New York and California, and from 1942, lived exclusively in California.

He settled in Sacramento, where he died on February 23, 1986. He was a juror for exhibitions at the Kingsley Art Club, and completed church murals and mosaics and did 14 oil paintings of the Stations of the Cross for St. Rose's Church in Sacramento. He also did work for churches in Texas, New York, and Pennsylvania.

The artist exhibited at the Prix de Rome (1927); 48 State Comp. (1939); and in Sacramento, CA (1940, 1945, 1946). Beck painted a portrait of William Adams Delano in 1934, which the sitter donated to the collection of the National Academy of Design, New York City. His work is included in the White House's East Room, Washington DC; the Rockefeller Center; and Smith College.