page_title: Maria Cosway
section_title: Work in Napoleonic France
hierarchical_section_title: Maria Cosway / Work in Napoleonic France
caption_attribution_description: Center detail of original engraving "The Hours" by Francesco Bartolozzi
context_page_description: Maria Luisa Caterina Cecilia Cosway was an Italian-English artist and educationalist. She worked in England, in France, and later in Italy, cultivating a large circle of friends and clients.
  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.
context_section_description: Throughout this period Cosway cultivated international contacts in the art world. When she sent an engraving of her allegorical painting The Hours to her friend the French painter Jacques-Louis David, he replied, "On ne peut pas faire une poésie plus ingénieuse et plus naturelle" ("one could not create a more ingenious or more natural poetic work"). Cosway became well-known throughout France and had customers from all over the Continent.
  Cosway also showed an interest in French politics. In 1797, then living on Oxford Street in London, she commissioned artist Francesco Cossia to create what was to be the first portrait of Napoleon seen in England. Cosway may have been 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." Later acquired by Sir John Soane, the painting is displayed in the Breakfast Room of Sir John Soane's Museum.
  While living in Paris between 1801 and 1803, Cosway copied the paintings of the Old Masters from the Louvre for publication as etchings in England. After the death of her daughter while she was in France, she did not finish the project.
  Maria Cosway met Napoleon while copying Napoleon Crossing the Alps by her friend David.  She became close friends with Napoleon's uncle, Cardinal Joseph Fesch.  During the Peace of Amiens, she gave British visitors tours of the Cardinal's art collection. One historian pointed out that her admiration for Napoleon may have been inspired by her then-lover Pasquale Paoli, a Corsican general in exile in London, who had been an associate of Bonaparte.
caption: Engraving by Francesco Bartolozzi of Maria Cosway's painting The Hours, described by Jacques-Louis David as "ingenious"
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