# William Beechey artist context and auction value notes

Canonical page: https://appraisily.com/artist/william-beechey/
Profile generated: 2026-05-12T19:55:00.000Z
Quality: high confidence, strong sources

## Artist identity

- Birth date: 1753-12-12
- Death date: 1839-01-28
- Nationality: British, English
- Movements: Golden Age of British Painting
- Common media: Oil on canvas

## About William Beechey

Sir William Beechey (1753–1839) was a leading British portrait painter whose career spanned the late Georgian and Regency periods. Born in Burford, Oxfordshire, he trained as a painter in London and rose to prominence through his ability to capture the likeness and social standing of his sitters with restrained elegance. Beechey was appointed portrait painter to Queen Charlotte and elected a Royal Academician, receiving a knighthood in 1798. His portraits of royalty, military officers, and fashionable society figures placed him among the foremost portraitists of his generation. Major institutions including the Tate, the Royal Academy, and the National Portrait Gallery hold his work. Collectors today encounter Beechey's paintings primarily through the Old Master and British Pictures auction markets.

## Common works and media

Beechey is best known for oil-on-canvas portraits ranging from intimate half-length and bust-format sittings to imposing full-length state portraits and group conversation pieces. Subjects include members of the royal family, senior naval and military officers, landed gentry, and prominent society figures. Engraved reproductions after his paintings were widely circulated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and these prints also appear at auction. Smaller cabinet portraits and occasional landscape or genre works attributed to his circle are encountered less frequently.

## Market and appraisal context

Beechey's works appear regularly at major auction houses in the Old Master Paintings and British Pictures categories. Values are influenced by the identity and historical significance of the sitter, the scale and format of the portrait (full-length versus bust-length), condition including any overcleaning or relining, and documented provenance. Attribution can be complicated by the practice of his workshop and the fact that his sons George Duncan Beechey and Henry William Beechey were also active portrait painters. Buyers should verify attribution through expert connoisseurship or catalogue raisonné references.

## Appraisily data basis

Appraisily artist pages combine structured artist identity research from authority files, museums, and scholarly databases with auction records, sale dates, realized prices, and comparable lots from major auction houses. For Sir William Beechey, sources include the Getty Union List of Artist Names, VIAF, the RKD Netherlands Institute for Art History, the Tate, Wikidata, and Wikipedia, alongside Appraisily's own auction-lot database of 395 recorded entries.

## Sources

- RKD Netherlands Institute for Art History: https://rkd.nl/en/explore/artists/5582
- Tate: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/sir-william-beechey-30
- VIAF: https://viaf.org/viaf/74124605/
- Getty Vocabulary Program: https://vocab.getty.edu/page/ulan/500014785
- Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q48566
- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Beechey