The only son of Colonel Thomas Beach, a Jamaican plantation owner who adopted the name of de la Beche, the sitter was intended for the army, but was expelled from the military college at Great Marlow. His interest in Geology probably stemmed from acquaintance with the fossil collector Mary Anning, whom he met in 1812. He married in 1818, and spent the next few years travelling on the Continent and in the West Indies. This picture may have been painted during a visit to Rome in 1829, when he sat to an unidentified artist called Saulini.

Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1819, he first carried out fieldwork in Pembrokeshire in 1822, and was secretary of the Geological Society in 1831-2. He was appointed Geologist to the Trigonometrical Survey of Great Britain (now British Geological Survey), and settled temporarily in Swansea in 1837, and the following year his daughter Bessie married Lewis Llewelyn Dillwyn. Knighted in 1842, he ws honorary director of the Jermyn Street museum of Practical Geology, and President of both the Geological and Paleaontographical Societies. De la Beche was a member of numerous foreign societies and academies, and corresponded with many prominent scientists of the day. Many of his papers were given to the NMGW's Department of Geology in the 1930s by the descendants of Bessie and Lewis Llewelyn Dillwyn.