Harvard Art Museums

Power of Death

William Holbrook Beard

Date

c. 1889-1890

Medium

Oil on board

Culture

American

Department

Department of American Paintings, Sculpture & Decorative Arts

Institution

Harvard Art Museums

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.

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