William Beard’s Grave

Strolling along Green-Wood Cemetery’s Atlantic Avenue one may come upon a magnificent cast metal bear perched upon a headstone. One might assume that this was put there during the cemetery’s heyday of grand sculptures and mausoleums in the late 19th and early 20th-centuries, but while this particular grave has been there since 1900, the bear is a more recent addition.

William Holbrook Beard was a painter who studied at the Düsseldorf Academy and later relocated to New York in 1861. He was known for his anthropomorphic portraits of animals performing human activities, as well as his famous painting “Bulls and Bears in the Market,” which helped popularize the association of those two animals with Wall Street.