Peter Beard

Peter Hill Beard (January 22, 1938 – March 31 / April 19, 2020) was an American artist, photographer, diarist, and writer who lived and worked in New York City, Montauk and Kenya. His photographs of Africa, African animals and the journals that often integrated his photographs, have been widely shown and published since the 1960s. Early life and education Peter Beard was born in 1938 in New York, the son of Roseanne (Hoare) and Anson McCook Beard Jr., heir to a railroad fortune. He was raised in New York City, Alabama, and Islip, Long Island. Beard began keeping diaries as a young boy and making photographs, as an extension of the diaries, at the age of 12. A graduate of Pomfret School, he entered Yale University in 1957, with the intention of pursuing pre-med studies, only to switch his major to art history. At Yale, he was tapped into the secret society Scroll and Key. His mentors at Yale included Josef Albers, Richard Lindner and Vincent Scully. Beard graduated with a BA in 1961. Inspired by earlier trips to Africa in both 1955 and 1960, Beard traveled to Kenya upon graduation. Working at Tsavo National Park, he photographed and documented the demise of 35,000 elephants and other wildlife, later to become the subject of his first book, The End of the Game. During this time, Beard acquired Hog Ranch, a property near the Ngong Hills adjacent to the coffee farm owned by Karen Blixen, which would become his lifelong home-base in East Africa.