William Holbrook Beard, N.A. (American, 1824-1900), "An American Bear Feasting on Grapes", c. early 1860s, oil on artist's board, signed with initials lower left, sight 7 3/4 in. x 10 in., approximate sheet 8 in. x 10 1/4 in., attractively matted (with upper corners curved) and framed. E5000-7000 Provenance: Kennedy Galleries, New York, label en verso. Note: Born of a Connecticut family pioneering in Ohio, Beard briefly painted portraits on the western frontier, before moving to New York in 1845, and opening a studio in Buffalo around 1850. He traveled through Europe in 1856-1858, spending a summer studying with the realist and genre masters at D?sseldorf; after two more years in Buffalo he transferred his studio to New York, on the eve of the Civil War, and worked there for the next forty years. Beard specialized in anthropomorphic paintings of animals-especially bears and monkeys-as satires on human behavior; he produced his first "monkey picture" on his arrival in New York, just two years after Charles Darwin's 1859 publication of the Descent of Man (and the notoriety of their popular themes, by 1862, had earned him a membership in the National Academy). His charmingly intimate images of bears (on whom he seems not to have inflicted human clothes, with which he routinely clad his other animals) are certainly his most appealing, and he concentrated on them increasingly in the 1870s and 1880s. This captivating parody of human gluttony, with an already over plump bear gorging himself on grapes-in the classic position associated with the reclining couches of ancient Roman banqueting- rooms-is evidently one of the earliest of Beard's paintings on these themes, since (in addition to the same subject) it shares the identical figure, tree, vine, glade, and sunlit perspective with the artist's large "March of Silenus" (45 in. x 35 in.) of c. 1862 in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, that was already acquired by the museum in 1874 (and engraved in G. W. Sheldon, American Painters, New York, 1878, opp. p. 59).