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William Holbrook Beard - 1824-1900 - American artist

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1994 by Robert McCracken Peck

When President Ulysses S. Grant laid the corn the American Museum of Natural History in New York City on June 2, 1874, he and the others who spoke at the ceremony tried to envision a time when the rough, wild West look of the museum's location would give way to the civility of its new building designed by Calvert Vaux (1824-1895). At least one New Yorker, the artist William Holbrook Beard, had a very different vision. Five years earlier he had prepared an alternate plan for the site that was intended to exploit, rather than tame, its wild appearance (see Pl. II and Figs. 2-4). The museum he proposed was unlike anything anyone had seen before.(1)

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Beard had been living in New York City for almost a decade when he submitted his design in 1869. Although he was not known as an architect, he had a solid reputation as a painter of landscapes, genre scenes, and, animals, treating the latter both as realistic subjects and as satirical caricatures of the Victorian middle class (see Pls. IV-VI, and VIII). At the time, New York was bustling with post-Civil War prosperity and the city's population was fast approaching one million. There was talk of establishing museums of art and science that would rival any in the world. As a member of the National Academy of Design and its social counterpart, the Century Association, Beard had probably joined the speculation on where these institutions could be built, who would design them, what they might contain, and how they could be paid for. One day, quite without warning, he found himself with a commission from an enigmatic financier named Henry Keep (1818-1869) to design a museum to be called the National Academy for the Advancement of Art on a nineteen-acre site on the upper west side of Central Park. Keep had pledged $1.5 million dollars to build, furnish, and buy a collection for the museum.(2)

Keep was every bit as unconventional as his sudden commission. With little more than a high school education, he had worked his way from a poorhouse orphan and teamster on the Erie Canal to a man of immense wealth and power. Only social acceptance eluded him. A long struggle with Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877) over control of the New York Central Railroad (of which Keep was briefly president) made the socially prominent Vanderbilt a bitter rival. By creating a museum for New York, Keep may have hoped to leave a permanent record of his own success.

Sadly, there is no surviving record to explain how Keep knew Beard. It is possible that they met through mutual friends in upstate New York, where Keep was born and where Beard first moved from his childhood home in Painesville, Ohio. Perhaps Keep had seen Beard's work in New York City and admired its irreverent treatment of the society that had refused to recognize Keep's success. In any case, while others were ruminating about the desirability of having museums, Keep decided to create one.

Keep's site was Manhattan Square, "a tract of broken, irregular ground"(3) west of Eighth Avenue (now Central Park West) between Seventy-seventh and Eighty-first streets, which the Central Park commissioners had acquired five years earlier as a possible location for the city's zoo.(4) The square was then a muddy, rocky morass bordered on the park side by squatters' cabins and shanty towns nicknamed Dutch Hill, Dublin Corners, and Cork, reflecting the immigrant status of their residents, whose numbers were then estimated by one New York newspaper as no fewer than twelve thousand.(5)

Keep saw his proposed museum as a vehicle for social improvement, open and free to all. As an embodiment of social Darwinism, he believed that anyone with enough curiosity, opportunity, and ambition could improve his lot in life. In his sketches of the proposed museum, Beard reflected Keep's social agenda by depicting visitors of all ages and every social order enjoying free access to the museum. (By contrast, a rendering of the proposed British Museum of Natural History in London by Alfred Waterhouse [1830-1905] a few years later shows a stream of middle-class visitors entering the museum while policemen chase a scruffy street urchin from the premises.(6))

Although Beard, like Keep, could trace his American roots to the early seventeenth century, he too was raised in modest circumstances without benefit of a father (the senior Beard having died shortly after his son's birth in 1824). Beard also could appreciate the importance of museums as centers for education, since what little formal instruction in art he may have received came from his elder brother James Henry Beard (1812-1893), a successful portrait, genre, and animal painter who served as a foster father, friend, and mentor to William throughout his life.

After six years as a struggling artist in Buffalo, New York, William Beard traveled to Europe to tour the artistic treasures of Italy, Switzerland, and Dusseldorf, Germany. While living in Rome he came to know Albert Bierstadt, Sanford Robinson Gifford, and Thomas Worthington Whittredge, all three of whom became life-long friends. After his return to the United States in 1858, he helped build an artistic community in Buffalo, an effort that culminated in the establishment of the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy in 1862.

William Holbrook Beard - 1824-1900 - American artist

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1994 by Robert McCracken Peck

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