Maria Cosway | |
|---|---|
 Self-portrait, 1787 | |
| Born | Maria Luisa Caterina Cecilia Hadfield 11 June 1760 |
| Died | 5 January 1838 (aged 77) |
| Nationality | Italian and English |
| Known for | Painter of portrait miniatures |
| Spouse | Richard Cosway |
Maria Luisa Caterina Cecilia Cosway (ma-RYE-ah[citation needed]; née Hadfield; 11 June 1760 – 5 January 1838) was an Italian-English painter, musician, and educator. She 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[citation needed].
She exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts, and commissioned the first portrait of Napoleon to be seen in England. Her paintings and engravings are held by the British Museum, the British Library, and the New York Public Library. Her work was included in London exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery in 1995–96 and Tate Britain in 2006.
Cosway was an accomplished composer, musician, and society hostess with her husband, painter Richard Cosway. She 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.
Cosway founded a girls' school in Paris, which she directed from 1803 to 1809. Soon after it closed, she founded a girls' college and school in Lodi, northern Italy, which she directed until her death. She bequeathed the school to the Catholic Institute of the "English Ladies" (Dame inglesi in Italian), a branch of the religious Order founded by Mary Ward, now seat of the "Fondazione Maria Cosway" (Maria Cosway Foundation).
She was made a Baroness of the Austrian Empire in 1834 (Lodi was then in the Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia, a State of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine).