He named it Hog Ranch for the roaming warthogs.īut the specifics are chilling.

So impressed was she with Beard, Dinesen paved the way for him to buy about 45 acres outside Nairobi adjacent to her former coffee plantation. Captivated by Isak Dinesen’s rendering in her book Out of Africa, Beard traveled to her native Denmark in 1961 to meet her. Although it is consistently reported that Beard was rich, a family member said his inheritance yielded between $50,000 and $100,000 a year-never enough for a man with a wingspan from New York to Nairobi.Īfrica was his lodestar and he riffed on its ecstatic beauty and deterioration throughout his life. His schools were patrician: Buckley, Pomfret, Yale.

In a documentary about his life, he announced that he was “not a WASP,” describing his family as “mackerel snappers,” a derogatory term for Catholics. The middle child of three boys, Beard grew up on Fifth Avenue and summered at his grandmother’s Gin Lane estate, La Dune, in Southampton. Hill, who founded the Great Northern Railway, and his step-grandfather was tobacco magnate Pierre Lorillard IV. And to understand his diaries, you must understand his life.īeard started out as a fashion photographer, but his images of a decaying Africa put him at the forefront of the environmental conservation movement, evincing what Lewis describes as his “complicated relationship with a primitive gaze on the continent.” As to what extent Beard successfully navigated the pitfalls of a white artist depicting Africa and Africans, Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, an associate professor at Harvard University in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and the Department of African and African American Studies, says that so far, there has not been enough critical scholarship on Beard’s oeuvre around the idea of “dismantling the ‘great white hunter’ model that enables some of his work.” That’s what makes Beard’s diaries-according to Lewis, his most important work-so urgent to understand. So far, little scholarly analysis exists of Beard’s work, but the diaries are among a trove to be excavated in his estate, which he willed to his wife, Nejma. In June, Taschen issued a fourth edition of a monograph, 770 pages of pictures from Beard’s career, much of it focused on his diaries, the most consistent project of his life and his self-proclaimed “obsession.” At more than a hundred, the diaries are chaotic, their pages bursting with artifacts of his day or his fancy: photos, quill-pen drawings, animal bones, product labels, tabloid headlines, and phone numbers. His entrenched use of drugs spoke to a remarkable stamina. Even into his 70s, Beard held court at nightclubs. He was a participatory artist, using his own blood sometimes, a touch of the visceral that linked him to his hero and friend the Irish painter Francis Bacon. The precincts that entranced him, and formed his lifelong work, were Africa and women.

His art was sometimes overshadowed by his attention-getting exploits, antics that should be considered “dust in the lion’s paw,” according to the writer and Beard friend Paul Theroux. But there is no template for an original like Beard, who possessed an insatiable appetite for drugs and danger. Peter Pan, Lord Byron, Tarzan, Casanova, Saint-Exupéry’s Petit Prince, Ernest Hemingway: All have been invoked to describe Beard. There was no sign of foul play-he’d simply, most likely anyway, wandered off. So it was puzzling and tragic when his body was found in woods near his Montauk home last spring. An elephant attack broke his pelvis in five places, and he blew enough cocaine to impress Keith Richards. In 82 years, he beat the odds many times. His nickname was “Walkabout,” an apt tag for the irrepressible spirit that was Peter Beard, as comfortable amid wild game in Kenya as he was behind the velvet ropes of a wild club.

Cast away beard