William Beard began Susanna and the Elders five years after he arrived in New York City from Buffalo, where he had established a modest reputation as a portrait painter and had also begun to paint the animal parodies for which he would become famous. He had already shown such boisterous pictures as Bears on a Bender (1861; location unknown) and the March of Silenus (1862; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, N.Y.) in which bears impersonate humans on a drunken spree. Susanna and the Elders is one of Beard's first attempts at a biblical subject; his wit, appropriately, is restrained rather than raucous.

Beard painted at least four versions of Susanna and the Elders in the mid-1860s, two of which appear to be studies for this work. Although the formats and the backgrounds vary from version to version, in all of them the cast of characters is the same: two great horned owls (representing the lecherous elders) peer through the reeds at an elegant swan (Susanna), who emerges from a dark grotto and glides past them, her wings raised slightly in alarm. The story Beard relates is from the apocryphal portion of the Book of Daniel (13:1-64). Two unprincipled elders spy upon the virtuous Susanna as she bathes. They accost her, demanding that she yield to their desires or they will claim to have witnessed her adultery with another. In Beard's painting, the tension of the biblical confrontation is defused by using birds to portray the protagonists; at the same time, their encounter humorously dramatizes the bestial aspect of human relations.

In depicting this moralizing biblical tale, Beard had many distinguished predecessors among the old masters. Rembrandt and Rubens, among others, painted Susanna surprised in her bath (see, for example, Ruben's Susanna and the Elders, ca. 1607, Galleria Borghese, Rome); in their work, the temptations of the flesh were made manifest in the voluptuous rendering of the female nude. But in using animals to parody human behavior, Beard follows the example of Sir Edwin Landseer (1802-1873), whose richly painted, heroic animal portraits were on occasion tinged with humor or were used to satirize human foibles. A host of lesser artists and political cartoonists, both English and American, painted animal fables. As is clear in Susanna and the Elders, Beard, like Landseer, was rare among them for being able to suggest living creatures who, whatever their human attributes, still retain the character of real beasts. Despite the liberties taken with scale in this picture, the birds are accurately rendered and are painted with such deftness and sensitivity to texture that their downy feathers seem almost palpable. The landscape elements are also painted with careful attention to detail. Each blade of grass, each wildflower, is crisply depicted, with a precision that approaches the meticulous, almost obsessively observed nature studies of the American Pre-Raphaelites, who also came to prominence in the mid-1860s.

A version of Susanna and the Elders, possibly this picture, was exhibited at the Brooklyn Art Association in 1875. Beard was then at the height of his popularity-his paintings commanded as much as six thousand dollars (though this one, being relatively small, was undoubtedly more modestly priced), and he numbered among his patrons such distinguished collectors of American art as the railroad magnate Henry Keep, Metropolitan Museum president John Taylor Johnson, and the famous connoisseur Thomas B. Clarke. By the end of his life, however, Beard's popularity had fallen off dramatically, and by the beginning of the twentieth century he was virtually forgotten. With the revival of interest in minor American masters in the mid-1970s, Beard's work was rediscovered and his reputation restored. Susanna and the Elders was one of the first of his major works to enter a museum collection in modern times.

CT


REFERENCE

William H. Gerdts. William Holbrook Beard: Animals in Fantasy. Ex. cat. Alexander Gallery, New York, 1981. Pp. 11, 16, 34.