The failing health of his wife compelled him at last to tear himself away from his splendid and beloved upholstery. He carried the ailing lady to Flanders and to Paris. During the tour his conduct was of the most lordly kind. He possessed, and highly prized, certain cartoons attributed to Julio Romano, having refused a liberal offer for them from Russia, because, as he explained, 'he would not sell works of elegance to barbarians.' Impressed with the size and emptiness of the Louvre Gallery, however, he now offered his cartoons to the French King as a gift. They were accepted, and four splendid specimens of Gobelin tapestry were bestowed upon the painter in token of royal recognition and gratitude. These tapestries Cosway, objecting to retain them, possibly lest they should seem to represent a price paid for his cartoons, forthwith presented to the Prince of Wales. It was the humour of the grand little man to oblige royalty, the while he was moved by a keen regard for his own dignity. While at Paris he painted, by desire of the Duchess of Devonshire, portraits of the Duchess of Orleans and family, and the Duchess of Polignac; yet, when applied to for portraits of the King or Queen, he declined the commission, stating that he had come abroad for the sake of his wife's health and his own amusement, and not with professional objects in view.
For a season Mrs. Cosway seemed benefited by the change, and returned home; but a second attack of illness compelled her again to leave England, this time accompanied by her brother—a young artist whose skill in design had gained him the gold medal of the Royal Academy. Walpole writes to the Miss Berrys at Florence: 'I am glad Mrs. Cosway is with you.... but surely it is odd to drop her child and husband and country all in a breath!' The lady was absent three years, constantly expecting her husband to rejoin her; but he was prevented by various causes from quitting England. During her stay abroad her daughter died, an only child. It was some relief to the grieving mother to resume her art-labours, and she painted several large pictures for foreign churches. At Lyons she was persuaded by Cardinal Fesch to attempt the founding of a college for young ladies, but the war hindered her efforts, although she succeeded subsequently in carrying out a similar design at Lodi.
To their one child the parents were tenderly attached, although Walpole, while he admits Mrs. Cosway's affliction to be genuine, goes on to say rather cruelly,—'the man Cosway does not seem to think that much of the loss belonged to him.' According to Smith, however, he was dotingly fond of his little girl; was for ever painting her picture; and in one portrait of her asleep, he introduced the figure of a guardian angel rocking the cradle. The body of the child was embalmed and preserved in a marble sarcophagus which stood in the drawing-room in Stratford Place. It was not until the return of Mrs. Cosway to England that the interment took place in Bunhill Row Burial Ground.
Of Cosway and his wife, it is stated by the biographer of Mrs. Inchbald, who numbered them among her most intimate friends, that they were both 'mystics,' and 'could say almost as much of the unintelligible world as of this.' Hazlitt describes the painter as a Swedenborgian, a believer in animal magnetism—professing to possess the faculty of second sight, crediting whatever is incredible. Had he lived in these our days, he would probably have been a spiritualist, an electro-biologist, a table-turner. He was wont to proclaim his ability to converse with the dead or the distant, 'to talk with his lady at Mantua,' says Hazlitt, 'through some fine vehicle of sense, as we speak to a servant down-stairs through a conduit pipe.' Smith tells us that he had often heard Cosway relate quite seriously, and with an air of conviction that was unimpeachable, conversations he professed to have held with King Charles the First! Sometimes he would startle sober people by asserting that he had just come from interviews with Apelles and Praxiteles. Four years after Pitt's death, Cosway, at the dinner of the Royal Academy, professed to have been that morning visited by the deceased minister, who declared himself prodigiously hurt, that during his sojourn upon earth he had not given greater encouragement to the artist's talents. Another Academician, however, rather outdid this story. 'How can you talk such trash, Cosway?' he asked. 'You know all you have uttered to be lies; I can prove it. For this very morning, after Pitt had been with you he called upon me and said, "I know Cosway will mention my visit to him at your dinner to-day, but don't believe a word he says, for he'll tell you nothing but lies."' This unlooked-for counter-statement took Cosway by surprise, and left him without a reply.
Walpole once said of him, happily, that 'he romanced with his usual veracity.' Hazlitt thought a 'mystic' character was common to artists, instancing Loutherbourg, Sharp, Varley, Blake, and others, 'who seemed to relieve the literalness of their professional studies by voluntary excursions into the regions of the preternatural, to pass their time between sleeping and waking, and whose ideas were like a stormy night with the clouds driven rapidly across, and the blue sky and stars gleaming between.'
For Cosway's wonderful collection of articles of art, antiquarianism, and vertû, Hazlitt has only good-natured banter. Of what a strange jumble of apocryphal treasures the painter believed himself the possessor! And he was without the doubts and anxieties of ordinary collectors. They strive to believe and to cast aside all suspicion. But Cosway believed without the slightest effort; he was troubled by no hint of suspicion. His relics and curiosities were in his eyes absolutely and unquestionably genuine. His was the crucifix that Abelard prayed to; a lock of Eloisa's hair; the dagger with which Felton stabbed the Duke of Buckingham; the first finished sketch of the Jocunda; Titian's colossal outline of Peter Aretine; a mummy of an Egyptian king; a feather of a Phoenix; a piece of Noah's Ark, etc. 'Were the articles authentic?' asks Hazlitt; and he answers his own question—'What matter? Cosway's faith in them was true!'
Credit is due to the painter for his indomitable good spirits and buoyancy of heart. His later years were passed in much pain. He had been twice stricken with paralysis, and the use of his right hand had gone from him. Though removed from want, his old extravagant habits had considerably impaired his fortune. He had long left Stratford Place for a humbler, cheaper house in the Edgeware Road. And he had somewhat outlived his reputation. He had to endure severe criticism upon his artistic merits: much calling in question of his position as a painter. Still he was always bright and gay and kindly. He would hold up the crippled, wasted hand that had painted lords and ladies—the kings and queens of society—for some sixty years, and smile with unabated good humour at the vanity of human wishes. So Hazlitt relates: going on to say of him—'His soul appeared to possess the life of a bird; and such was the jauntiness of his air and manner, that to see him sit to have his half boots laced on, you would fancy (by the help of a figure) that instead of a little withered old gentleman, it was Venus attired by the Graces.' His nature was generous and frank. He gave liberally and cheerfully to almost everybody who applied to him for money. The number of letters he received requesting pecuniary assistance was stated to be almost incredible. Of borrowers who never repaid what they borrowed of him, and of patrons in default, of whom he was too proud to make repeated claims for what was strictly his due, a long catalogue might have been made.
He died suddenly at last of a third attack of paralysis, on the 4th day of July 1821. The seizure occurred as he was taking a carriage drive to Edgeware, and he expired without a groan in a few minutes. He had long been in doubt as to whether he should prefer to be buried in his native Devonshire or with his favourite Rubens at Antwerp. But struck with the orderly plan of a funeral in the vaults of a London Church, he had said, 'I prefer this to Antwerp or St. Paul's: bury me here.' He was interred accordingly at Marylebone New Church (the work of young Smirke, son of his brother academician), a select number of his professional and personal friends, and a long line of the carriages of his aristocratic patrons, following the funeral.
Mrs. Cosway erected, on the north wall, under the gallery of the church, a monument by Westmacott, to her husband's memory. The following indifferent epitaph by the painter's brother-in-law, 'Syntax' Coombe, was inscribed upon the marble:—
'Art weeps, Taste mourns, and Genius drops the tear O'er him so long they loved who slumbers here. While colours last, and Time allows to give The all-resembling grace, his name shall live.'