1. Maria Luisa Caterina Cecilia Cosway was an Italian-English painter, musician, and educator.
32 Facts About Maria Cosway
1. 2.
Maria Cosway worked in England, France, and later Italy, cultivating a large circle of friends and clients, mainly as an initiate of Swedish and French Illuminism and an enthusiastic revivalist of the Masonic Knights Templar.
3.
Maria Cosway exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts, and commissioned the first portrait of Napoleon to be seen in England.
4.
Maria Cosway had a brief romantic relationship with widowed American statesman Thomas Jefferson in 1786 while he served in Paris as the envoy to France; the pair kept up a correspondence until his death in 1826.
5.
Maria Cosway founded a girls' school in Paris, which she directed from 1803 to 1809.
6.
Maria Cosway bequeathed the school to the Catholic Institute of the "English Ladies", a branch of the religious Order founded by Mary Ward, now seat of the "Fondazione Maria Cosway".
7.
Maria Cosway was made a Baroness of the Austrian Empire in 1834.
8.
Maria Cosway was born in 1760 in Florence, Italy, to Charles Hadfield, said to have been a native of Shrewsbury, England, and an Italian mother.
9.
Maria Cosway's father was a successful innkeeper at Livorno, where he had become very wealthy.
10.
One of eight children, Maria Cosway demonstrated artistic talent at a young age during her Roman Catholic convent education.
11.
At her father's death, Maria Cosway expressed a strong desire to become a nun.
12.
Maria Cosway went to Rome, where she studied art under Pompeo Batoni.
13.
Maria Cosway studied with Anton Raphael Mengs, Henry Fuseli, and Joseph Wright of Derby.
14.
Maria Cosway was 20 years her senior, known as a libertine, and was repeatedly unfaithful to her.
15.
Maria Cosway forbade his wife from selling her paintings, possibly out of fear of the gossip that surrounded female painters.
16.
Maria Cosway soon enhanced her reputation as an artist, especially when her portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire in the character of Cynthia from The Faerie Queene was exhibited.
17.
Richard was a principal painter of the Prince of Wales, and Maria Cosway served as hostess to artists, members of royalty including the Prince, and politicians including Horace Walpole, Gouverneur Morris, and James Boswell.
18.
Maria Cosway could speak several languages, and due to her travels in Italy and France, she gained an international circle of friends.
19.
Richard and Maria Cosway had one child together, Louisa Paolina Angelica, but the couple eventually separated.
20.
When staying in Lyon, France, Maria Cosway made a pilgrimage to the shrine of the Virgin Mary at Loreto.
21.
Maria Cosway became well known throughout France and had customers from all over the Continent.
22.
Maria Cosway met Napoleon while copying Napoleon Crossing the Alps by her friend David.
23.
Maria Cosway became close friends with Napoleon's uncle, Cardinal Joseph Fesch.
24.
At least one account held that Maria Cosway began to develop stronger feelings for Jefferson, but when she travelled to Paris to meet him again, she found him more distant.
25.
Historians such as Andrew Burstein have suggested the relationship was romantic mostly on Jefferson's side, and that Maria Cosway was his opposite, more artistic than rational.
26.
Maria Cosway introduced Jefferson to her friend Angelica Schuyler Church, the sister-in-law of his rival Alexander Hamilton.
27.
Maria Cosway kept an engraving by Luigi Schiavonetti from a drawing by Maria's husband.
28.
Maria Cosway eventually returned to the Continent, travelled with her brother George Hadfield in Italy, where she lived in the north for three years, and then returned to England after her daughter's death at age six, concentrating on painting, completing several religious pictures for chapels.
29.
Maria Cosway directed the Collegio delle Grazie in northern Italy until her death in 1838.
30.
In 1821, Maria Cosway briefly returned to England to care for her husband before his death.
31.
Maria Cosway drew The Progress of Female Dissipation and The Progress of Female Virtue, published in 1800.
32.
Maria Cosway published a series of 12 designs, entitled The Winter's Day contributed to Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery and Macklin's Poets.