An artistic alliance - Richard and Maria Cosway

Magazine Antiques, Dec, 1995

Richard and Maria Cosway, both artists, were the toast of London at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. Thomas Jefferson described them as "possessing good sense, good humour, honest hearts, honest manners, and eminence in a lovely art." An exhibition that examines their position in intellectual, social, and artistic circles is on view at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Entitled Richard and Maria Cosway: Regency Artists of Taste and Fashion, the show includes some 250 works and remains on view until February 18, 1996.

Richard Cosway, born in 1742 near Tiverton in Devonshire, demonstrated a talent for drawing at the age of seven and at twelve was sent to London to study art with William Shipley. There Cosway became acquainted with such important collectors as Charles Towneley and, eventually, the Prince of Wales, later George IV. As a successful oil and miniature painter of fashionable Regency society, Cosway was elected to membership in the Royal Academy in 1771. His reputation was further enhanced by the popularity of engravings made after his drawings and paintings. Flamboyant in dress and demeanor, Cosway was derided for his dandyism by other artists of the time and figured in a number of caricatures. Nonetheless, he was particularly adept at self-promotion, coming to be appointed primarius pictor (principal painter) by the Prince of Wales in 1785 and advising him on his acquisitions for Carlton House, which Cosway helped decorate.

Maria Louisa Caterina Cecilia Hadfield Cosway was raised in Florence, Italy, where her father, Charles, kept an inn patronized by the English aristocracy on the grand tour, as well as by visiting English writers, artists, and collectors. She was educated in a convent in Italy and remained fervently Catholic throughout her life. In 1779, three years after her father's death, the family moved to London. Two years later, in what is presumed to have been an arranged match, Maria married Richard Cosway, some twenty years her senior. She exhibited her paintings at the Royal Academy throughout the 1780s, and although many of them are unlocated today, documents confirm that they were mostly portraits and history paintings, often on Biblical themes.

Maria Cosway, once called "the Goddess of Pall-Mall," was also an accomplished musician. She organized concerts and recitals, which were performed in their residence, Schomberg House, on Pall Mall, and were attended by such luminaries as Horace Walpole, Gouverneur Morris, and James Boswell. In 1790, following a difficult pregnancy, Maria gave birth to their only child, Louisa Paolina Angelica. Oddly, she left her husband and child shortly thereafter and traveled to Italy where she remained for the next four and a half years. She returned in November 1794, eighteen months before Louisa became ill and died.

Between 1801 and 1803 Maria Cosway was in Paris, where she shared a commission to record the arrangement of old-master paintings in the Louvre for publication by subscription as a series of etchings, colored or monochrome. In Paris she saw much of the painter Jacques Louis David, and she became acquainted with Cardinal Joseph Fesch, who agreed to assist her in founding a college for young women in Lyons, which she ran from 1803 until it was closed in 1809.

Still passionate about women's education, she renewed her acquaintance with Francesco Melzi d'Eril, the duke of Lodi, who invited her to come to Italy and establish a convent school for young girls. She ran the Collegio delle Grazie in Lodi until 1817, when she returned to London to be with her ailing husband.

In addition to being a painter, Richard Cosway was a dedicated collector. An inventory taken a year before his death reveals a house crowded with decorative arts objects, paintings, some twenty-five hundred old master drawings, and seventy-five hundred prints. After he died, his widow, with the help of Sir John Soane, Thomas Lawrence, and others, arranged for the dispersal of his collection in a series of five auctions. The proceeds were used to endow her school in Lodi, where she lived until her death in 1838.

The catalogue of the exhibition was written by its curator, Stephen Lloyd, and contains essays by Roy Porter and Aileen Ribeiro. It has 143 pages, 104 color plates, and 30 black-and-white illustrations and may be obtained for [pounds]14.95 (paper covers) from the National Portrait Gallery, 2 St. Martin's Place, London WC2H 0HE, England.