Peter Beard photo fetches almost $450,000 at auction

 

 

Famed photographer Peter Beard has been known as many things over his life: dilettante, playboy, and celebrity photographer. But he's most renowned for his work as a wildlife photographer, and one of his most famed images just fetched $449,000 at auction.

Christie's auction house recently held a sale exclusively of Beard's work, which racked in $1,290,187 for 28 of his works. But by far the one that fetched the most was a print of his famed "Orphaned Cheetah Cubs", which went for $449,000 — substantially beyond the estimated $150,000-$250,000 the auction house pegged it at.

Beard is well known for introducing collage elements into his work, and this particular print was made in 1998, with "ink drawings by Mathenge & Kivoi" and is a large 63 1/8 x 86 5/8 in. in size.

Interestingly, this wasn't the only version of that same image up for auction. A smaller copy went for $87,500 — one of many variants of the photograph that Beard has produced over the years.

For more of a look at Beard as an artist, there was a short interview with him we posted earlier this year, and New York Magazine ran an excellent piece on the attempts to raise his prominence in the art world.