Beechey, William RA (Sir)

1753

1839

Beechey was born at Burford in Oxfordshire in 1753. Initially articled to a solicitor, he attended the Royal Academy as a student at the age of 21 in 1774. He started exhibiting at the Royal Academy from 1776 and, over a period of 62 years, he showed 375 paintings, virtually all of them portraits. From 1782 to 1787 he worked in Norwich, returning from there to London, where he established a successful practice. As an artist of the second rank (he was a rival to Hoppner), his reputation became eclipsed towards the end of his career by that of Lawrence. Opie once remarked that ‘his pictures…seemed only fit for sea captains and merchants.’ He found favour, however, with the royal family, securing the appointment of portrait painter to Queen Charlotte. In 1798 he was knighted and made a member of the Royal Academy. Beechey had no particular connection with the stage, and the Club’s picture is a version, from Charles Mathews’s collection, of the original at Dulwich Picture Gallery, commissioned by Desenfans about 1798.