Illustration and practical education
Beard was born in Cincinnati and studied at New York’s Art Students League in the early 1880s. His American Boys Handy Book offered practical activities, while illustration commissions included the first edition of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. He also taught at the New York School of Applied Design for Women.
Outdoor skills became a larger part of his public work. In 1905 he founded the Sons of Daniel Boone, one of the organisations that preceded the Boy Scouts of America. He helped establish the latter in 1910 and remained a national scout commissioner for the rest of his life. His career connected making pictures and books with programmes that taught young people to make and do things themselves.
Drawing an imagined expedition
Astor’s A Journey in Other Worlds appeared in 1894. Beard’s role is illustrative: the title and illustration list distinguish his nine drawings from Astor’s writing and from a separately listed diagram. The planetary comparison chart should not automatically be counted as another Beard picture.
The Callisto frontispiece sets a small vehicle against the sweep of a comet. Elsewhere, travellers ride a giant tortoise through dense vegetation. The change of scale gives exploration both an immense setting and a bodily form. These pictures accompany a narrative whose imagined future carries familiar ambitions of mining and using land into other worlds. Beard makes its encounters visible without becoming the author of their political and technological assumptions.
