William Beechey

Portrait painter.

Beechey’s Portrait of Sir Francis Ford’s Children Giving a Coin to a Beggar Boy has been interpreted as pro-slavery propaganda: ‘The unusual emphasis given in this picture to the abject poverty and desperation of the beggar boy might, then, be giving visual form to the familiar pro-slavery sentiment concerning poverty’. (Martin Myrone, ‘Sir William Beechey, Portrait of Sir Francis Ford’s Children Giving a Coin to a Beggar Boy, exhibited 1793’, Tate [online], September 2013, <https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/beechey-portrait-of-sir-francis-fords-children-giving-a-coin-to-a-beggar-boy-t06734> accessed 23 June 2021.) Four generations of Fords were plantation owners in Barbados. (UCL Department of History, ‘Sir Francis Ford 2nd Bart.’, in UCL Department of History (ed.), Legacies of British Slave-ownership [online], London 2020, <https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/2763> accessed 23 June 2021.)

No known connections with abolition.

Donor: Beechey was among a group of subscribers who presented John Constable’s The Cornfield (NG130) in 1837.

History of Parliament Trust (ed.), The History of Parliament: British Political, Social & Local History, London 1964-, https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/
Checked and not found — Item on publisher's website

UCL Department of History (ed.), Legacies of British Slave-ownership, London 2020, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/
Checked and not found — Item on publisher's website

J. Wilson, 'Beechey, Sir William', in J. Turner et al. (eds), Grove Art Online, Oxford 1998-, https://doi.org/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.T007266
Checked and found — Item on publisher's website

J. Wilson, 'Beechey, Sir William', in C. Matthew et al. (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford 1992-, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/1949
Checked and found — Item on publisher's website