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Maria Cosway was an Anglo-Italian artist, composer, and musician who is perhaps best known as the love interest of Thomas Jefferson while he served as the American envoy to Paris. Cosway was born Maria Louisa Caterina Cecilia Hadfield (pronounced Mariah) to an English father of “lowly origin”, Charles, who had previously been an innkeeper at Leghorn, and an Italian mother living in Florence, Italy in 1760. Cosway’s parents were wealthy and ran three inns for British aristocracy taking the Grand Tour in Tuscany. Cosway demonstrated artistic talent at a young age during her Roman Catholic convent education; she would remain a devout Catholic for her entire life. Her brother George Hadfield became an architect and would later design Arlington House, The Robert E. Lee Memorial in Virginia.

Cosway’s family suffered a tragedy during her childhood when a mentally ill nursemaid murdered four of Cosway’s brothers and sisters, sparing her, brother Richard and a younger sister, Charlotte; the nurse was caught after she was overheard speaking about planning to murder Maria. The nurse thought that her young victims would be sent to heaven after she killed them and was sentenced to life in prison. Three years after her father’s death, Cosway moved to London in 1779.

While still in Florence, Cosway studied art under Violante Cerroti and Johann Zoffany. From 1773 to 1778, she copied Old Masters at the Uffizi Gallery. For her work, she was elected to the Academia del Disegno in Florence in 1778.

Two women, Angelica Kauffmann and Mary Moser, had founded the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1768. Kauffmann helped Cosway enter the Academy. Cosway went on to gain success as a painter of mythological scenes.

On 18 January 1781, Cosway married fellow artist, the celebrated miniature portrait painter Richard Cosway, in what is thought to be an arranged marriage and later a marriage of convenience due to his being 20 years her senior.[7][4] Richard was “well known as a libertine and commonly described as resembling a monkey.”

Richard realized his wife’s talent and helped her to develop it. More than 30 of her works were displayed at the Royal Academy of Art from the 1780s until 1801. Many have not been located in modern times, but documents show that her art consisted of mostly Biblical scenes or historical themes.

Cosway began to gain fame as a painter of miniatures like her husband and an engraver and went to Paris to advance her career. She became famous throughout France and received customers from all over the Continent.

In 1797, Cosway, then living on Oxford Street in London, commissioned artist Francesco Cossia to create what was to be the first portrait of Napoleon ever seen in England. Cosway was thus apparently the first person in Britain to see the face of Napoleon. Her commission of the portrait would later be called the “earliest recorded evidence of British admiration for Napoleon. “The painting was later acquired by Sir John Soane and is now on display in the Breakfast Room of Sir John Soane’s Museum.

She lived in Paris from 1801 to 1803 to copy the paintings of the Old Masters from the Louvre for publication as etchings in England, and while copying Napoleon Crossing the Alps by her friend Jacques-Louis David, Cosway met Napoleon. She would later give British visitors tours of Napoleon’s uncle Cardinal Joseph Fesch’s art collection during the Peace of Amiens. One historian pointed out that her admiration for Napoleon may have been inspired by her lover Pasquale Paoli, a Corsican general in exile in London who had been an associate of Bonaparte’s.

Her project at the Louvre was considered her greatest project, but it remained unfinished because she lost a child, sunk into a depression and decided to give up painting. Her Louvre engravings are in the collection of the British Museum.Two of her paintings depicting the events of a poem of Mary Robinson’s were acquired by the New York Public Library and appeared in a “Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination” exhibition at the Tate Britain museum in London in 2006.

From 1995 to 1996, the National Portrait Gallery in London held an exhibition entitled Richard and Maria Cosway: Regency Artists of Taste and Fashion, with 250 works on display.

In 1784, the Cosways moved into Schomberg House, Pall Mall, which became a fashionable salon for London society. Richard was Principal Painter of the Prince of Wales and Cosway served as hostess to artists, members of royalty including the Prince, and politicians including Horace Walpole, Gouverneur Morris and James Boswell.[1][3][4] She could speak several languages, and due to her travels in Italy and France, she gained an international circle of friends. She was friends with the fashionable elite such as Angelica Schuyler Church and artist John Trumbull, and it was at this time that she met Thomas Jefferson.

“The Goddess of Pall-Mall” was an accomplished musician who would organize concerts and recitals for her guests.

In August 1786, the Cosways were introduced by John Trumbull to Thomas Jefferson, who was serving as the American Minister to France in Paris. Jefferson was 43 and Cosway was 27 when they met. After their first meeting at the Grain Market (Halles aux Bleds), Jefferson uncharacteristically lied to his scheduled dinner companion that he needed to tend to official business so that he could spend the evening with Cosway at the Palais Royal.

Cosway and Jefferson shared an interest in art and architecture and attended exhibits throughout the city and countryside together. He would write of their adventures: “How beautiful was every object! the Pont du Neuilly, the hills along the Seine, the rainbows of the Machine of Marly, the terraces of Saint Germain, the chateaux, the gardens, the statues of Marly, the Pavilion of Louveciennes… In the evening, when one took a retrospect of the day, what a mass of happiness had we travelled over!”Over the course of the six weeks, Jefferson developed a romantic attachment to Cosway as they spent each day together.

Upon her departure for London at the insistence of her husband, he wrote Cosway a love letter dated October 12-13, 1786 that has been called “The Dialogue of the Head vs. the Heart”, in which he writes of his head conversing with his heart and the struggle between the practical and the romantic. He wrote the letter with his left hand because he had broken his right wrist during Cosway’s visit, while jumping over a fountain in a rush to meet her.

Scholars suggest that Jefferson was particularly partial to a romantic attachment at this point in his life, because his wife had died four years earlier, he had just learned of the death of his daughter Lucy, and his other children were away at school. Cosway, by at least one account, began to develop stronger feelings for Jefferson and traveled to Paris to meet him again, only to find him more distant this time. Because Cosway was a devout Catholic who did not want to have children and compulsively worried about pregnancy, according to some historians nothing further came of their affair besides correspondence. Their letters would continue the rest of Jefferson’s life after she contacted him, following Jefferson’s ending of the letters while he was still in Paris. Historians assert that the relationship was romantic mostly on Jefferson’s side, and Cosway was his opposite, more artistic than rational. In any case, both parties saved their letters to each other.

Before Jefferson left Paris, he wrote to her, “I am going to America and you are going to Italy. One of us is going the wrong way, for the way will ever be wrong that leads us further apart.”

Cosway also introduced Jefferson to her friend Angelica Schuyler Church, the sister-in-law of his rival Alexander Hamilton, who kept up a correspondence with both Jefferson and Cosway in later life; Church’s correspondence with both is now preserved at the University of Virginia’s archive.

He would keep an engraving done by Luigi Schiavonetti, from a drawing Richard made of Maria, in Monticello. Cosway had Trumbull create a portrait of Jefferson which she kept. The portrait was later given as a gift from the Italian government to the American government on the occasion of America’s bicentennial in 1976 and now hangs in the White House.

After a difficult pregnancy, Cosway had a daughter with Richard, Louisa Paolina Angelica, in 1790. She then left them for Italy and a tour of Europe for four and a half years to accompany the famous Italian singer Luigi Marchesi, returning in November 1794. Eighteen months later, Louisa died after an illness. Cosway was devastated by the loss, but Richard was not as upset.

In 1791, the Cosways moved to a larger house in Stratford Place. Cosway and Sir John Soane enjoyed a friendship of more than two decades in the later years of their lives, and he was a frequent visitor to her home as well as a fellow art collector. The Cosways’ marriage did not last and was eventually annulled.

Cosway founded a college for young women in Lyons with the help of Cardinal Fesch. She ran the college for young women from 1803 until it closed in 1809. She then was convinced by the Duke of Lodi to move to Italy and start a convent and school for girls in Lodi, Italy. She ran the Collegio delle Grazie until she returned to England to care for Richard in his ill health; after his death, she and Sir Soane held an auction of his large artistic collection, and the benefits helped her convent school.

Cosway returned to Italy after her husband’s death. Due to her work in educating girls, Austrian emperor Franz I awarded her the title of Baroness.A letter survives at the University of Virginia in which Cosway mourns her old friends following the death of Angelica Church. As a tribute to Church, Cosway designed a temple ceiling depicting the Three Graces surrounding her friend’s name.Cosway died at her school near Lyons.

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