“Power of Death”, William Holbrook Beard, c. 1889-1890
William Holbrook Beard, (American, 1824 - 1900)
Oil on board, 53.7 x 44.1 cm. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Purchase through the generosity of Howard E. Cox, Elizabeth Gosnell Miller, Mrs. John S. Hamlen, Lawrence J. Lasser, George Lewis, Michael Maher, James W. McGlothlin, Robert H. and Dale Mnookin, Thomas R. and Ann Schwarz, Charles O. Wood, III and Miriam M. Wood, and other friends in honor of James Cuno.
---
Beard was active in Buffalo and in New York City, where he had a studio in the 1860s in the famous Tenth Street Building alongside painters including John La Farge. He specialized in animal paintings whose anthropomorphized subjects satirize human folly. Painted shortly before Beard’s death, this work is his most macabre. Death, an animated corpse wearing a shroud, grips a withered tree and strangles a tiger with his bare hand. The bodies of other exotic animals — a lion, a camel, and an elephant — are strewn around a dark and desiccated wilderness. A red sun gleams eerily on the horizon. Beard likely studied the animals in what began as a menagerie in New York’s Central Park, or in P. T. Barnum’s American Museum on lower Broadway. He may have been inspired by notorious circus disasters of the time, including the death of Barnum’s prize elephant, Jumbo, who was struck by a train in 1885.
-Harvard Art Museums
---
Source and download: https://hvrd.art/o/99764