Maria Cosway
Italian artist
Died when: 77 years 208 days (930 months)Star Sign: Gemini
Maria Luisa Caterina Cecilia Cosway (ma-RYE-ah; née Hadfield; 11 June 1760 – 5 January 1838) was an Italian-English painter, musician, and educator.She worked in England, in France, and later in 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.
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 the 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 Catholic convent and girls' school in Lodi, northern Italy, which she directed until her death.
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