William Holbrook Beard

William Beard grew up in Painesville, Ohio. His father, a captain on the Great Lakes, died when Beard was still a child, and his mother raised him and his elder brother, James Henry (1812–93), alone; James also became an artist, painting mainly portraits and genre scenes. At twenty Beard became an itinerant painter; he began exhibiting his pictures in the 1840s, and in 1860, after a period in Buffalo and then a few years in Europe, he settled in New York, where he spent the rest of his life. In 1862 he was elected a full member of the National Academy of Design, and until 1899 he exhibited there and at the Brooklyn Art Association. Beard painted mostly from imagination and did not much care for the country where real bears lived. After a summer train journey west of the Rocky Mountains in 1866 he wrote to his wife that the landscape was boring and the wildlife disappointing. When his animal pictures went out of fashion towards the end of the century, Beard was almost entirely forgotten. Deer on the Prairie (pictured) is another example of his work.

From the page of The Bear Dance