Maria Cosway
Diane Boucher, Out of the Shadows: Rediscovering Maria Cosway
Unicorn Press, Lewes, 2025 ISBN 978-1-916846-78-4
Thomas Tuohy
In The Portraits of the Academicians of the Royal Academy by Zoffany (Royal Collection), exhibited in 1772, Richard Cosway occupies a prominent place in the foreground, on the right, adopting a pose similar to the Apollo Belvedere with an arm outstretched, with the ferule of his cane pressing, pointedly, on the nether regions of a cast of a marble Venus. Cosway, who was born near Tiverton, Devon, in 1742, was then only thirty. He had been a youthful prodigy who started painting portrait miniatures in 1762, and he went on to become the principal painter to the Prince of Wales in 1785. He was also a connoisseur and collector, who advised the prince, and from 1784–1791 he lived close to Carlton House in the largest section of Schomberg House on Pall Mall. In the economic recession in London in the aftermath of the French Revolution the number of his clients diminished, and their debts were not paid. At his death in 1821 he was still owed nearly £3000 for work carried out for the Prince of Wales before 1808.
Cosway sold part of his collection and moved to Stratford Place, off Oxford Street, where he lived until 1821, and the way in which he furnished the house with his eclectic collections, creating a special atmosphere, was much admired by Hazlitt, Soane and Lawrence, who described it as an ‘Artist’s House’. Stephen Lloyd has written extensively on Cosway, including the catalogue of a significant exhibition shown in Edinburgh, and London in 1995 Richard and Maria Cosway, Regency Artists of Taste and Fashion. It includes an essay, ‘Richard Cosway: Collector, Connoisseur, and Virtuoso’, which emphasizes his importance in these fields, notably in Old Master paintings and drawings.
Cosway, while his portrait miniatures remain his greatest achievement, is now seen as being of interest as much for his taste and collecting as his painting. It could also be said of Maria Cosway that her life was more interesting than her painting, and this fascinating cosmopolitan life has been brought ‘out of the shadows’ in a sympathetic, well researched and eminently readable book by Diane Boucher.
From Schomberg House there was a fine view over Marlborough House gardens and St James’s Park towards Westminster, which is preserved in a print of 1789, A view from Mr Cosway’s Breakfast-Room Pall Mall (Pl 1).
1 A view from Mr Cosway’s Breakfast-Room Pall Mall
after William Hodges (1744–1797) (landscape) and Richard Cosway (1742–1821) (portrait).
Etching by William Birch (1755–1834), 18.0 x 20.6 cm
It shows Westminster Abbey and St John Smith Square in the middle distance, gazed upon by his wife Maria, who is seated at a window of their house, where she is attended by a whippet. She had been born Maria Hadfield in Florence in 1759, at an inn on the Lungarno Guicciardini managed by her father, Charles Hadfield, who was from a rich Manchester family. Her mother Isabella may have been Italian but Maria, in an account of her life written in 1830 is sparing in detail. Carlo, as her father was known, was described by Mrs George Craster as ‘a saucy imposing man’. He features in A Punch Party, a painting of 1760 by Thomas Patch, holding a punch bowl aloft (Pl 2).
2 A Punch Party in Florence by Thomas Patch (1725–1782), 1760.
Oil on canvas, 114.5 x 171.5 cm. National Trust, Dunham Massey
Hadfield owned three inns adapted to the tastes of his compatriots, which were supplied with English furnishings and provender through the English Factory in the Tuscan port of Leghorn (Livorno). One of these other inns was also in the Oltrarno, very close to Palazzo Manetti in Via Santo Spirito, where Sir Horace Mann held court as the British Resident of Florence. The third inn was outside the Porta San Gallo, near Montughi, not far from the Villa Palmieri, home between 1760 and 1789 to the great connoisseur, George, 3rd Earl Cowper. Young Maria attended musical entertainments there, and the Earl was later a guest of the Cosways in Schomberg House in 1786.
Maria was educated at a convent in the Oltrarno, and grew up in elevated circles, both social and artistic, displaying precocious talents in painting and music. She was tutored in painting from the age of eight by Violante Sirries Cerrroti, and then by Johan Zoffany, who arrived in Florence in 1772. She copied paintings in the Uffizi and Palazzo Pitti, and was commissioned at the age of 16 to make a copy of Raphael’s Niccolini Madonna, which had been acquired by Cowper through Zoffany, who included the painting in The Tribuna of the Uffizi (Royal Collection). Maria’s copy of the Raphael was shown to Reynolds to assess the quality of the original. She knew Joseph Wright of Derby, who stayed at one of the Hadleigh inns in 1775. Maria visited Rome in the company of Lord Cowper’s mother-in-law, Mrs Gore, in 1777, and lodged with the sculptor Thomas Banks and his family. She became friends with James Northcote, Henry Fuseli and Prince Hoare, who were all studying in Rome under Anton Rafael Mengs. She also knew Ozias Humphry and John Soane. In 1778 Maria was admitted to the Accademia delle Arti di Disegno in Florence, and submitted a self-portrait, in which she wears a turban.
Her father had died in 1776. Her mother sold the businesses in Florence and in 1779 the family moved to London where Maria had introductions to Reynolds, and to Angelica Kauffmann, who inclined her towards painting literary subjects, although she left England in 1781, moving to Italy with her husband Antonio Zucchi. Life in London was expensive and a rich marriage for Maria offered a remedy to the Hadfield family, in which there were several younger siblings. It is probable that Maria was introduced to Cosway by a mutual friend, the great collector of antique statuary, Charles Townley, who was from a recusant Lancashire family. At the marriage in St George’s Hanover Square in 1781, Townley gave her away, and Thomas Banks was a witness. Richard Cosway was 18 years older than Maria, but rich and with a flourishing career. He settled a generous allowance on her, with which Maria could help support her family. Although she was fluent in Italian and French, Maria’s English was imperfect, and for the first year of marriage she was in purdah as she was prepared for London society. Her polyglot talents were to prove a great asset as a hostess, and in future travels in Europe.
In 1782 at the Royal Academy she showed a portrait, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire as Cynthia (Cynthia is a character in Spenser’s The Faerie Queen). This, her masterpiece, was inspired by a figure of Mercury by Raphael in the vault of the loggia of the Villa Farnesina. Between 1782 and 1801 she showed 38 paintings at the Royal Academy, although her husband forbade her to sell any of her work. Many of the exhibited pictures have not been identified, but are known from prints, for example, a Self-portrait of 1787, where she again wears a turban, and with her arms folded, is known from a reproduction by Valentine Green. A Persian going to adore the Sun, 1784, in the Soane Museum, which was a gift to the architect, is her only work in a public collection in Britain. Women were not allowed to attend life-drawing classes, and this lack of training is evident, for example, in the work of Angelica Kauffmann, as the exhibition at the Royal Academy in 2024 exposed. A quotation from the satirist Anthony Pasquin provides a succinct credible explanation: ‘I have not seen the works of any female who could draw the human figure correctly; their situation in society, and compulsive delicacy, prevents them from studying nudities, and comparing those studies with muscular motion; though without such aid, they cannot do more than design pretty faces and graceful attitudes, without authority from nature to warrant the transaction.’
Schomberg House offered lavish musical entertainments organized by Maria, who sang and played the harp. Luigi Marchesi, one of several Italian castrati who appeared here, was to become a supportive friend. The Prince of Wales was a regular guest and in 1786 when the Cosways visited Paris they exchanged gifts with King Louis XVI. The Cosways progressed to Antwerp. Costumes inspired by Rubens and van Dyck appear in the works of both Cosways, and Maria had made a copy of the Rubens’s Four Philosophers in the Palazzo Pitti before she went to London. She painted a self-portrait based upon Rubens’s Portrait of Susanna Lunden, which was then still with family in the van Havre collection. The Rubens original, with the name Chapeau de Paille, was acquired in 1828 by Sir Robert Peel, and has been in the National Gallery since 1871. In 1790 Maria gave birth to a daughter, Louisa Paolina, named after the Corsican patriot General Pasquale Paoli, but for t reasons she then travelled to Italy. Horace Walpole wrote to Mary Berry in Florence ‘surely it is odd to drop a child and her husband and country, all in one breath’. Odder still, she remained in Italy for more than four years. She was the guest in 1792 of Luigi Marchesi, in Milan or in his country house at Inzago, while he was regularly singing at La Scala. Then, with some difficulty, as her husband was a protestant, she found a retreat in the convent of Santa Brigida, Genoa.
By the time Maria returned to London, Cosway had moved to Stratford Place. Their daughter Louisa died in 1796, was embalmed, and kept in the house in a marble sarcophagus carved by Banks. Cosway, a follower of Swedenborg, had very different beliefs from his wife. Maria was a devout catholic and felt uncomfortable in London during the Gordon Riots in 1780. English was not her first language: she remained essentially Italian and was more at home in Europe. While in Paris from 1801 to 1803, through her friendship with Dominique Vivant-Denon, the Director of the Louvre (later briefly called the Musée Napoleon), she undertook an ambitious project to make etchings to illustrate the hang of pictures. Many of these works had been looted from Italy, and this short-lived display was probably the finest collection of Old Master paintings ever assembled. Only nine out of Maria’s 57 plates were completed for the Gallery of the Louvre at Paris and they were criticized for being insufficiently finished. Her aim – ‘to give no more than a picturesque description’ – was clearly inadequate, and most of the prestigious list of supporters whom she had recruited cancelled their subscriptions.
Maria had established a close friendship in London with General Paoli, who was then living there in exile. He introduced her to Joseph Fesch, Napoleon’s uncle, later a cardinal who officiated at the Emperor’s coronation, and he supported her in setting up a school in Lyon, where he was briefly archbishop. The Lyonnais took against the project, however, and the school closed in 1809. Through a mutual friendship with Baron d’Hancarville, who had been invited to catalogue the Townley collection, Francesco Melzi d’Eril was introduced to her in London in 1787. Later, as Vice-President of the Cisalpine Republic, he bought a convent at Lodi, near Milan, where Maria established a school for girls, the Collegio delle Grazie, which opened in 1812.
The prestige of the college as it evolved attracted the notice of the Habsburg rulers of Lombardy, and Maria was created a baroness by Emperor Francis I of Austria in 1834. Maria was a friend of Giulia Beccaria, daughter of the famous jurist, and mother of the novelist Alessandro Manzoni, whose daughter Vittoria attended the school. Maria had returned to London in 1816 to look after her husband, but after Richard’s death and the sale of his collections in 1821 she took the residue to Lodi, where it remains. The school closed in 1978, and the buildings now house the Fondazione Maria Cosway, where an exhibition was dedicated to her in 2022.
As Diane Boucher points out Maria was a consummate networker. Many more notables feature in this book than can be mentioned in this review, but her most sincere and enduring relationship was with Thomas Jefferson, later to become the third President of the United States. They met in 1786 in Paris, where the widowed Jefferson was the American Minister to France, and exchanged letters until his death in 1826. They met in Paris again in 1788, spending some weeks together visiting houses and gardens in the environs of the city. Architecture may have been of more interest to him than it was to Maria, and he built a Palladian house on his estate at Monticello, near Charlottesville, Virginia. A portrait of Jefferson by the American painter John Trumbull was given to Maria in 1788. In contrast to most of the illustrations in this book there is nothing of the artificial in this miniature image, which measures about 5 x 3 inches. On the bi-centenary of the Declaration of Independence of 1776 the Italian Government made a gift of it to the White House Collection in Washington.