George Jarvis Brush was born on December 15, 1831, in Brooklyn, New York.

He was a mineralogist, geologist, and educator. He studied chemistry, metallurgy and mineralogy at the Sheffield Scientific School, Yale University (1848-1852). From 1852 to 1855, Brush worked and studied at the University of Virginia and in Munich and Freiberg, Germany. He returned to Sheffield in 1855 to join the faculty as a professor of Metallurgy and later of Mineralogy. He was appointed the first curator of the Peabody Museum of Natural History's mineral collection. He was a member of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1872, he became the first director of Sheffield, where he also supervised mineralogy. He also served as the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1881. He published extensively in the American Journal of Science and other journals. He also published a “Manual of Determinative Mineralogy “(1875). In 1904, Brush donated his collection of minerals, along with funds for their maintenance, to Sheffield. The mineral brushite was named in his honour.

In 1864, he married Harriet Silliman Trumbull (1835–1910). He died on February 6, 1912, in New Haven, Connecticut.