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 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.

[5][6] One of eight children, Maria demonstrated artistic talent at a young age during her Roman Catholic convent education.

Two women artists, Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser, were among the original members of the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1768.

In 1781, she exhibited for the first time, showing: Rinaldo, Creusa appearing to Aeneas (engraved in mezzotint by V. Green), and Like patience on a monument smiling at grief.

[9][failed verification] On 18 January 1781, Maria Hadfield married a fellow artist, celebrated miniature portrait painter Richard Cosway, in what is thought to have been a marriage of convenience.

Cosway also forbade his wife from selling her paintings, possibly out of fear of the gossip[further explanation needed] that surrounded female painters.

[16] When staying in Lyon, France, Maria Cosway made a pilgrimage to the shrine of the Virgin Mary at Loreto.

When she sent an engraving of her allegorical painting The Hours to her friend, 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").

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.

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's.

[3] At the Grain Market (Halles aux Bleds), in Paris, August 1786, John Trumbull introduced the Cosways to Jefferson, then a widower at 43 serving as American minister to France.

[9] Jefferson then begged off his scheduled dinner companion, saying he needed to tend to official business, and instead spent the evening with Maria at the Palais Royal.

[20] During the same period, Jefferson began a relationship with Sally Hemings, a mixed-race enslaved girl and the half-sister of his late wife, at the time aged between 14 and 16, who was pregnant by him when the household returned to the United States in 1789.

[21][22][23] At least one account held that Cosway began to develop stronger feelings for Jefferson, but when she travelled to Paris to meet him again, she found him more distant.

[18][20][25] Historians such as Andrew Burstein have suggested the relationship was romantic mostly on Jefferson's side, and that Cosway was his opposite, more artistic than rational.

[3][8] Trumbull was commissioned by Maria to paint a portrait of Jefferson;[27] this remained in the collection of Cosway's paintings and papers looked after by the nuns at the convent school she had founded in Lodi until the Italian government put immense pressure on the nuns at the American Bicentennial to relinquish it, so that Italy could give it to the White House, where it remains aside from a brief display as part of a Smithsonian exhibition.

With the aid of her friend Sir John Soane, she auctioned Richard's large art collection, and used the funds to support the convent school.

[4][7] For a short time, following the death of Richard Cosway, her close friend Sir John Soane served as the executor to her estate.

[28] In a letter to Jefferson (held by the University of Virginia), Cosway mourned the loss of mutual old friends following the death of Angelica Schuyler Church.

[27] In June 1826, she wrote to Italian engraver Giovanni Paolo Lasinio, Junior, respecting the publication of her husband's drawings in Florence.

They were included in the exhibit Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination at the Tate Britain museum in London in 2006.

[32] From 1995 to 1996, the National Portrait Gallery in London held an exhibition entitled Richard and Maria Cosway: Regency Artists of Taste and Fashion, displaying 250 of their works.

She also published a series of 12 designs, entitled The Winter's Day contributed to Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery and Macklin's Poets.