William Holbrook Beard (1825-1900) was a popular painter of comedic animal scenes; it was he who first popularized the Wall Street “bulls” and “bears” by depicting them wrestling on the trading floor in an 1879 work.
His resting place on the cemetery’s Atlantic Avenue, almost the, er, dead center of Green-Wood, was unmarked until 2002, when cemetery historian Jeffrey Richman alerted gallery owner Alexander Acevedo, who had presented a retrospective of Beard’s work at his own gallery in 1981, about the absence of a memorial stone. Acevedo took out a two-page advertisement in Antiques magazine soliciting contributions toward ″A Tomb for the Unmarked Well-Known Artist,″ and attracted Colorado sculptor Dan Ostermiller, who donated his sculpture, a bronze bear sitting on a new tombstone as Beard finally got his due.
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11/2/18