THACH, Nathaniel

1617 - c.1659

Nathaniel Thach was baptised in his grandfather's church at All Saints', Barrow, Suffolk on 4 July 1617, son of Richard Thach (d. 1652), a freeman of the Salters' Company, and his wife Priscilla Cradock, daughter of the Revd Richard Cradock (1562–1630). Priscilla Thach was the sister of John Cradock (b. 1595), who married Dorothy Braughton (3 August 1630) and who succeeded his father as rector of Barrow and was the father of Mary Beale. The Thach's lived in the parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields, London but by early 1644, Nathaniel had left London and may, like Alexander Cooper (1609-1660), another miniaturist, lived and worked abroad, perhaps at the expatriate Stuart court at The Hague, for he was described in the will of his uncle John Cradock (2 April 1644) as ‘late of London, picture drawer’. He was bequeathed by Cradock, who was an accomplished amateur and a freeman of the Painter–Stainers' Company, ‘all my empastered rounds’ presumably, vellums stretched on cards stiffened with gesso on both sides, ready for painting. Thach's miniatures are almost always derived from paintings mostly encountered on the continent, the 'Woman in a Masque Costume' 1649 (V&A) is a copy after a portrait of Elizabeth of Bohemia's twelfth child, the Princess Sophia. Thach, as the scion of a wealthy household in London and connected through his Suffolk background to a circle of keen connoisseurs of painting, should be seen as a skilled amateur. Works by Thach are in the Royal Collection, the Mauritshuis in The Hague, and the Musée Carnavalet in Paris, as well as the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. His identifiable works seem to cluster narrowly at the end of the 1640s and early 1650s. The latest date, 165[?], the final figure being illegible, appears on the signed version of the Charles II after Hanneman in the Mauritshuis.

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Works by This Artist