TWENTIETH-CENTURY MAN

Biography of the well-known wildlife advocate, art photographer, socialite, and fashion icon.

According to Wallace, Peter Beard (1933-2020) was “a man of action, maybe the last great romantic adventurer,” and Paul Theroux called him "the first person to chronicle the decline of wildlife…of East Africa.” From their initial encounter for an Interview magazine profile in 2016, Wallace has remained fascinated by this "proto-influencer" whose "prep-kid-gone-bamboo style" would inspire entire fashion collections in his image. Beard’s jet-set lifestyle included friendships with the artists Dalí, Warhol, and Francis Bacon, who considered Beard his muse. He attended bullfights with Picasso, and he romanced Cheryl Tiegs (his second wife), Iman, and Lee Radziwill. "Obsessed with the idea of Africa," Beard made his home at Hog Ranch, his own "patch of bush" teeming with wildlife, outside of Nairobi, Kenya. He kept lifelong diaries, took hundreds of photographs, and made collages documenting his quest for an aesthetic ideal he called "primitiva.” Throughout his life, he endeavored to make himself "a vessel for art." Wallace emphasizes Beard's overriding insight that "the end of wildlife…is the end of us" as a species. The author succeeds in looking beyond Beard's surface appeal as the "ideal avatar for our adventurous impulses, shirtless on a perpetual safari,” to explore what he calls Beard's fatalism, his "heartbreak over the destruction of the natural world.” He was, writes the author, "a savant in the bush." Near the end of his life, he walked out of his Montauk compound without his heart medication, which he could not go without for more than 24 hours. After 19 days of searches, a hunter found his body in the woods nearby. Beard had achieved his lifelong goal: a final return to the wilderness, which for him was not a geographical location but a state of being.

A vivid account of a life devoted to the African wild.