Date: Date Unlisted
Format: Watercolor
Description: Supposedly a portrait of Mary Anning painted by De la Beche.
Very little information is available online. The best information I can find is from the blurb on the cover art of a 1985 edition of the Geocurator [geocurator.org], which says only that the painting is "reputed to be by Thomas de la Beche", that its "present whereabouts [are] unknown" and that it has been used with the "kind permission of the Department of Geology, National Museum of Wales." It is also referred to as De la Beche's in 2000 nomination for World Heritage listing for the Dorset Coast [whc.unesco.org; pdf], but this document has even less information.
The obvious assumption is that "Thomas De la Beche" is Henry Thomas de la Beche, but the Geocurator is not clear on this point, and it is not obvious why the Geocurator would have used his middle name rather than his first. As far as I can tell, Henry had no sons, but he did have an illegitimate brother by the name Thomas Alexander Beach, who could conceivably have gone as "Thomas De la Beche". (De la Beche's father had changed his last name "Beach" to "De la Beche" to make it look more dignified.) It might have been another relation entirely: Henry's uncle John had apparently also changed his name from Beach to De la Beche, and it is possible that other relations had done the same. For all I know, the painting might not even be from the period. The art doesn't quite look to me to be in De la Beche's style. Nevertheless, as it has been attributed to him, in absence of further information I have included it here.
For more on Anning, see her entry on the biography page.
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Sources & further discussion:
The best (but still sparse) information on this piece can be found in a 1985 edition of the Geocurator [geocurator.org]
Image yoinked from:
Wikipedia [en.wikipedia.org]
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