William Holbrook Beard - 1824-1900 - American artist

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)

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.

Beard moved to New York City in 1860 and rented a studio in the renowned Tenth Street Studio Building, which Richard Morris Hunt (1827-1895) had designed and built in 1857 specifically for the use of artists. Other painters with studios in the building when Beard arrived included Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church, William Merritt Chase, John La Farge, and later, Winslow Homer.(7)

Beard's paintings of landscapes, animals, and allegorical scenes during this period were both critically acclaimed and a source of public controversy. Two of his most important early works, The March of Silenus of 1862 and Jealousy of 1863(8) were separately lambasted for immorality in 1864 by Clarence Cook, the editor of The New Path (1863-1865), the journal for the Society for the Advancement of Truth in Art, a conservative organization devoted to the promotion of Pre-Raphaelite ideals. Jealousy, which shows a male rabbit discovering his unfaithful wife in a passionate embrace with a rival male, prompted Cook to rail against the artist's betrayal of the public trust and the standards of common decency.(9) The March of Silenus shows the god Silenus as a drunken bear being escorted through a forest grove by an intoxicated entourage of cavorting bears and goats. Of this Cook wrote, "nothing so low...has ever, to our knowledge, been deliberately and habitually painted...since pagan days."(10) Fortunately for Beard, Cook's views were in the minority. The influential art critic James Jackson Jarves (1818-1888), for example, extolled The March of Silenus as "the most elaborate and best painted of [Beard's] quaint compositions" and Jealousy as more worthy in its expression of emotion "than it has been our fortune as yet to see put into human form in our [American] painting."(11)

Beard painted a wide range of subjects, including portraits, but his realistic and anthropomorphized animals were his greatest popular success. Bears, squirrels, rabbits, cats, and monkeys were his most frequent stars and the animals with which he is most closely associated today. He even incorporated a number of them in his designs for the tunnel-like entrances to Keep's museum--the most innovative features of his conception. These entrances were intended to replicate the course of cultural evolution from raw nature to the height of modern sophistication.(12)

According to an article in Scribner's Monthly describing Beard's plan, anyone wishing to attain the morally improving contents of the museum would first have to negotiate a series of frightening man-made caves and tunnels replicating nature in its untamed state. On the western edge of Central Park, visitors would have confronted an enormous cave-like passageway guarded by an ominous pair of "colossal stone figures" representing Ignorance and Superstition, "barring the avenue to aesthetic culture".(13) Just beyond these "grim giants" was to be a carved stone menagerie of "grotesque antediluvian animals of immense size...symbolical of the rode origin of art."(14)

Those not daunted by the grimaces of twenty-foot lions, tigers, and bears or the long "irregular and slightly tortuous subterranean roadway"(15) that led under Eighth Avenue would have arrived eventually in a large antechamber dominated by a formidable, if somewhat less threatening, carved human figure, "the guardian genius of the place"(16). From there visitors could either return to Central Park through another tunnel guarded by still more large carved animals or climb a flight of stone stairs and continue to experience first hand "the gradual progress of the word from barbarism to civilization."(17) The culmination of this evolutionary journey was to have been a large gallery filled with artistic depictions of "the famous characters of recent times"(18) elsewhere identified as "our statesmen, soldiers, orators, and poets, the types of a perfect civilization."(19)

As for his suggestion for the museum itself, Beard sketched an immense domed building in a hybrid style that incorporated references to everything from Westminster Abbey to the Taj Mahal. Contemporary critics supposed that Beard's rendering of the building was fanciful, but it seems just as likely that its exotic design had as much meaning for Beard as its more carefully drawn entrances. Many nineteenth-century philosophers, from John Ruskin (1819-1900) to Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), believed that art and nature were windows to God and their study was a path to redemption. What better way to express the improving nature of a museum than to design it as a grand cathedral, symbolically merging all religions and their associated architectural styles? If a visitor's trip through the museum was to re-create the evolution of life and civilization, was it not reasonable to offer the full range of man's creations alongside those of nature? In this regard, Beard's unfinished plans were as innovative as his assignment had been challenging.

In designing his museum, Beard may well have consulted his fellow member of the Century Association, Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, a versatile British artist who was internationally celebrated for his life-sized reconstruction of prehistoric life at the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London.(20) In 1868 he was invited by the commissioners of Central Park to create a Paleozoic museum in the southwest corner of the park, opposite Sixty-third Street, which would provide a "complete visual history of the American continent from the dawn of creation to the present time."(21)

In 1870 Hawkins was also commissioned to prepare a design for an ethnological and paleontological museum for the newly established Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.(22) Several of his interior views for this museum are very similar in character to the exterior designs for Beard's museum in New York City. It is possible, indeed likely, that the two men worked together in developing these closely related museum designs. A recently discovered album of Hawkins's drawings for the New York and Washington projects(23) reveals that the Englishman had planned a series of large animal displays that would have been among the first in America to reconstruct dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures as they were then believed to have appeared in life. The album also indicates that Hawkins was planning an outdoor zoological garden and aviary, possibly for the same Manhattan Square location in which Beard and Keep were hoping to build the National Academy for the Advancement of Art.

As one of the leading scientific illustrators of his day, Hawkins had worked with Charles Darwin (1809-1882) while preparing illustrations for the naturalist's first scientific book, The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, published between 1839 and 1843. While he did not accept Darwin's theories on evolution in their entirety, Hawkins's museum plans for both New York City and Washington, D.C., reflect the concepts, if not the details, of Darwin's discoveries.

Similarly, Beard's thinking and museum designs were heavily influenced by Darwin, although, like Hawkins, Beard refused to believe in man's descent from more primitive primates. Several of Beard's monkey pictures from the 1860's and 1870's refer specifically to Darwin and his theories of evolution. The Youthful Darwin Expounding his Theories, for example, painted shortly after the publication in 1859 of Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, shows a young ape discussing a small collection of frogs and tadpoles with two older apes.(24) Viewers can only assume it is the young Darwin lecturing his elders about the complex concepts of evolution. In The Runaway Match of 1877, two young monkeys in formal dress stand before an older monkey, presumably a justice of the peace or parson, while a gaggle of other monkeys looks on. The parson, wearing a striped dressing gown, leans on an armchair in which lies a newspaper entitled The Darwinian, which shows an engraving of the bearded Darwin shaking hands with an ape. These and a number of similar oils by Beard are among the first to lampoon Darwin in America.

Regrettably, neither Beard's nor Hawkins's museum designs ever came to fruition. Beard's patron Henry Keep died in 1869, just as Beard was completing the first round of plans, and the independent nature of the project, a distinct advantage when Keep was alive, doomed the museum to oblivion once he was no longer available to champion and subsidize it.

Hawkins's New York and Washington museum projects were also stillborn. When he ran afoul of William (Boss) Tweed (1823-1878) and the Tammany Hall machine, which then ran New York City, Hawkins's Central Park studio and the sculptures it contained were attacked and destroyed by a mob of vandals (presumably at Tweed's behest).(25) His proposed Smithsonian design was scuttled by the lethal ax of budget cuts about the same time, thus inflicting on Hawkins a devastating double rejection within a year. Although he had made his reputation interpreting the inter-species struggles of the prehistoric world, he was not accustomed to the tooth and claw of contemporary politics.(26) His spirit broken by the destruction of his New York City studio, Hawkins left the city forever, moving first to Princeton, New Jersey, where he created some gloomy landscape oils for the university,(27) and then back to England, where he died in 1889.

Beard continued to exhibit his unconventional museum designs for several years, trying, without avail, to sell the concept to the newly organized boards of the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.(28) But Calvert Vaux's more conservative designs, not Beard's, were eventually chosen for the two museums to be built on opposite sides of the park. In the decades that followed, the wild appearance of Manhattan Square, on which Beard had hoped to capitalize, was ultimately tamed.

Disappointed but not defeated, Beard returned to his Tenth Street studio to paint increasingly satirical representations of businessmen, scientists, and politicians in the guise of animals. His Bulls and Bears in the Market of 1879(29) and The Bear Dance, both from this period, are today among his best-known works. Over the next thirty years Beard's brief foray into architecture was forgotten and his popularity gave way to painters of more modern tastes. Although he remained socially active and a venerable "Nestor of American Art"(30) until his death in February 1900, what hopes Beard may have had to redirect public perceptions of art through museum architecture and gallery design had been buried with Henry Keep and the National Academy for the Advancement of Art some thirty-one years before.

1 For their help with this article I would like to thank Alexander Acevedo, William H. Gerdts, Annette Blaugrund, Nancy Anderson, Elizabeth Blackmar, Johnathan Harding, Marguerite Lavin, Michael Gotkin, Rebecca Shanor, Janet Parks, Alexandra Nicolescu, Deborah McCaffrey, Barbara File, Nina Root, Joel Sweimler, Carol Spawn, Janice Lurie, David Dearinger, Mary Bell, Tom Giordano, Susan Wilder, Elizabeth Prelinger, Catherine Stover, Keith Thomson, and particularly Jenny Lawrence, whose idea it was to write this story. I would welcome heating from anyone having original paintings or drawings by Beard or correspondence from or relating to him and his associates.

2 New York Times, July 31, 1869.

3 Eleventh Annual Report of the Commissioners of Central Park, 1867 (New York, 1868), p. 149.

4 Ibid.

5 The clipping with these statistics, from an unidentified and undated newspaper of about 1869, is in a recently discovered album of drawings by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins now housed in the archives of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.

6 See Mark Girouard, Alfred Waterhouse and the Natural History Museum (London, 1981).

7 For a detailed discussion of the Tenth Street Studio Building see Annette Blaugrund, "The Tenth Street Studio Building" (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, New York City, 1987); and ANTIQUES, January 1992, pp. 223-225.

8 Jealousy is unlocated.

9 The New Path, vol. 1 (February, 1864), p. 134.

10 New York Daily Tribune, April 9, 1864, quoted in William H. Gerdts, William Holbrook Beard: Animals in Fantasy (New York, 1981), p. 17.

11 The Art-Idea (New York, 1864), p. 183.

12 The commissioners of Central Park had recognized the need for an underground passage to Manhattan Square as early as 1866, but it is doubtful they imagined one as unusual as Beard proposed (see the Tenth Annual Report of the Commissioners of Central Park, 1866 [New York, 1867], pp. 14, 108; and the Eleventh Annual Report...1867, pp. 95, 149).

13 John Rose Greene Hassard, "An American Museum of Art. The Designs Submitted by Wm. H. Beard," Scribner's Monthly, vol. 2 (August 1871), p. 413.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid.

17 New York Daily Tribune, March 30, 1871.

18 Hassard, "An American Museum," p. 413.

19 New York Times, April 2, 1871.

20 Illustrated in Lynn Barber, The Heyday of Natural History, 1820-1870 (New York, 1980), pp. 177-178.

21 Thirteenth Annual Report of the Commissioners of Central Park, 1869 (New York, 1870), p. 29.

22 See Cynthia R. Field, Richard E. Stamm, and Heather P. Ewing, The Castle: An Illustrated History of the Smithsonian Building (Washington, D.C., 1993), pp. 80-81.

23 See n. 5.

24 The painting is owned by the American Museum of Natural History, New York City.

25 For an account of Hawkins's abandoned museum scheme see Adrian J. Desmond, "Central Park's Fragile Dinosaurs," Natural History October 1974, pp. 64-71.

26 In 1872 Beard was one of a group of well-known artists who unsuccessfully petitioned the Central Park commissioners to revive Hawkins's Paleozoic museum in New York City. For more about this, see Edwin H. Colbert and Katherine Beneker, "The Paleozoic Museum in Central Park, or the Museum that Never Was," Curator, vol. 2 (1959), pp. 137-150.

27 They are in the geology department of Princeton University.

28 For more about the ultimate selection of the architectural designs for Manhattan Square, see Robert McCracken Peck, "The Museum That Never Was," Natural History, vol. 103, no. 7 (July 1994), pp. 62-67.

29 In the New-York Historical Society, New York City.

30 New York World, December 7, 1884, quoted in Gerdts, William Holbrook Beard, p. 21.

ROBERT MCCRACKEN PECK, a fellow of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, has written widely on subjects as varied as natural history and the history of art.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group