Chats on Old Miniatures

by J. J. Foster

Talking of collections, it may be observed that Cosway himself was a great collector. His house, No. 1, Stratford Place, was full of costly works of art, of silks, china, and gems of bijouterie and vertu, in which he trafficked and dealt, and his wife, Maria, fully shared the painter's taste. I may here say something about this lady, who was in many ways a remarkable woman.

She was the daughter of an Irishman named Hadfield, who was an innkeeper at Leghorn. Maria was born in Florence, in 1759, and lived to be nearly as old as her husband. After studying art in Rome, she came to England, where she took up miniature painting as a profession. Her first contributions to the Royal Academy were in 1781, in which year Cosway married her, she being then twenty-two, of a blonde type of beauty, with soft blue eyes. She practised art in various forms. At Hardwicke, in the collection of the Duke of Devonshire, there is a really fine picture painted by her of the beautiful duchess as Cynthia, full length, in oils, life size. Allan Cunningham observed of this picture that when it was exhibited there was no little stir. The likeness was excellent, and its poetic feeling not unworthy of the poet (Spenser) whose work inspired it. At Longford Castle the Earl of Radnor has a full length, also in oils, of a lady of the family.

W. WOOD.

PORTRAIT OF A GENTLEMAN.

UNKNOWN.

MARIA, DUCHESS OF COVENTRY.
(J. G. Fanshawe, Esq.)

As to her miniatures, Cunningham says: "Almost the first time she was seen in public she was pointed out as the lady who had painted some of the most lovely miniatures in the Royal Academy," and he adds, "her reputation was made at once, for nothing was talked about but the great youth and the great talent of Mrs. Cosway. One half of the carriages that stopped at her husband's door contained sitters ambitious of the honours of her pencil." He says that the painter was too proud a man to permit his wife to paint professionally. But inexorable though he was in regard to painting, "he was more gentle in the matter of music, of which Maria was passionately fond, and he had a handsome house and good income and allowed her to indulge in those splendid nuisances called evening parties."

With a character so full of vanity and weakness as Cosway's was in some respects, it is not surprising to learn that, after twenty years of married life, incompatibility of temperament, as the phrase goes, developed between this ill-assorted pair, and at the beginning of the last century Mrs. Cosway was separated from her husband. In 1804 she retired to a religious house at Lyons, Cunningham says "owing to the death of her daughter." She was in London as late as 1821-2 selling her deceased husband's property, old miniatures and so forth, for Cosway had died whilst taking the air in 1821. Her final visit to England was in 1829, on a similar errand. She then retired to Italy, and founded a college at Lodi, near Milan, which grew into a religious house in connection with the order known as the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and here she died, in 1838.