Thomas Patch (13 March 1725 – 30 April 1782) was an English painter, printmaker in etching, physiognomist and art historian.

[citation needed] In addition, Patch was amongst the first artists to study early Italian art seriously and he published series of prints that reproduce of work by Giotto, Masaccio, Ghiberti and Fra Bartolommeo.

The volume about Fra Bartolommeo, published in 1772, was inscribed, The life of Frá Bartolommeo della Porta, a Tuscan painter, with his works, engraved from the original pictures, dedicated, to the Honourable Horace Walpole, an Intelligent Promoter of the fine Arts, by his most Obedient and most humble Servant Thomas Patch.

[11] Patch appears in Johann Zoffany's "The Tribuna of the Uffizi" where we see him engaged with Sir Horace Mann & company appraising the charms of the Venus of Urbino.

Zoffany places Patch's right hand on the painting whilst wryly having him gesture towards a classical sculpture of nude wrestlers with his left.

In his paintings in the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter and in the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven he is shown as a sculpted bust displayed on a wall sconce and in the twelve-foot long painting at the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale (another version is at Chatsworth, Derbyshire) of a party of Englishmen at Sir Horace's palazzo in Florence, "The Golden Asses," the artist sits astride the eponymous equine.