Thomas Beach

(Milton Abbas 1738-1806 Dorchester)

Portrait of Edmund Pytts and his brother Samuel standing by a commemorative urn in parkland with a spaniel, a view of Kyre House beyond

Footnotes

Provenance
Edmund Pytts (1729-1781) of Kyre, Worcestershire
His brother Jonathan Pytts
His kinsman William Lacon Childe (1786-1880) and thence by descent through the Childe family

The Pytts family lived at Kyre near Tenbury Wells in Worcestershire (see fig. 1) for around 250 years after acquiring the estate in 1575 from Lord Compton. They were major landowners in Worcestershire and Herefordshire and - like the Pitts to whom they were related - politics ran in the family. Their political involvement went back to the 17th Century when various family members sat for Herefordshire constituencies; Edmund Pytts, (1729-1781) the subject of this portrait, was the third generation of his family to represent Worcestershire. He was MP for the county from 1753 to 1761 and High Sheriff in 1771. He brought in W & D Hiorne to remodel Kyre in the 1750s and around the same time Capability Brown was commissioned to work on the design of the park. On Edmund's death in 1781 the estate passed to his brother Jonathan and then to a second cousin, thereafter becoming the seat of the Childe family.

Thomas Beach grew up in Dorset and his talent earned him the support of the family of Lord Dorchester who patronised him during his training in London in the studio of Sir Joshua Reynolds where he worked while studying at St Martin's Lane Academy. He subsequently moved back to the West Country, basing himself in the fashionable spa town of Bath which attracted many artists of the day, drawn by the plentiful opportunities for work. More accessible than London, Bath would have been an obvious place for wealthy landowners such as the Pytts to turn when commissioning a portrait.