Out of the Shadows: Rediscovering Maria Cosway

The beautiful Anglo-Italian artist Maria Cosway was one of the most talented and dynamic women active in Regency England, but one whose achievements have been largely overlooked. Born in Florence in 1760, she was acclaimed at an early age as both a painter and a musician. She exhibited forty-one paintings at the Royal Academy summer exhibition between 1781 and 1801, and hosted regular musical soirées at the Pall Mall house she shared with her husband, Richard Cosway. They were attended by the political and cultural elite of London. Maria’s extraordinary network of connections to the great and the good of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, included friendships with, among others, Thomas Jefferson, the Prince of Wales, Pasquale Paoli, the artist Jacques-Louis David, the opera singer Luigi Marchesi, the Duchess of Devonshire, the actress and writer Mary Robinson, and members of the Bonaparte family. Estranged from her husband by 1801, Maria Cosway largely gave up painting and reinvented herself as a progressive educator, founding schools for young women: first in Lyon, later in Lodi, Italy. In recognition of her achievements at Lodi, the Emperor of Austria made her a baroness.

Diane Boucher was born in London and has an MA in History of Art from University College London. From 1998-2002, she was Research Director for the Commission for Looted Art in Europe. She later moved to the United States, where she worked at the Crab Tree Collection of American and British Arts and Crafts, and then at the Fralin Museum of Art, University of Virginia. She has published magazine articles and books on the arts and interior design. She lives in London and Suffolk with her husband and has two grown-up children.