Thomas Beach

Thomas Beach (1738 – 17 December 1806) was an English painter who specialised in portrait painting and studied under Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Life and work John Kemble and Mrs. Siddons, in "Macbeth", painted in 1786, now housed at the Garrick Club in London.

Beach was born at Milton Abbas, Dorset in 1738, and showed a strong predilection for art from an early age. In 1760, under the patronage of Lord Dorchester's family, he became a pupil of Sir Joshua Reynolds, while at the same time studying at the St. Martin's Lane Academy. He then settled at the fashionable resort of Bath, where he was much in demand for his portraits and portrait groups, which were usually of a small size. In 1787 he painted Mrs. Siddons and John Kemble in the Dagger Scene in Macbeth, of which the actress wrote, "My brother's head is the finest I have ever seen, and the likest of the two". Portraits of Sir Edward Wilmot, bart., M.D., and Richard Tattersall, the horse dealer who established 'Tattersall's, were exhibited in the National Portrait Exhibition of 1867.