Between 1781 and 1801, Maria Cosway exhibited forty-two paintings at the Royal Academy. Some of her images circulated as prints, engraved by distinguished printmakers like Francesco Bartolozzi, but most of the paintings are ‘untraced’, a word that sadly recurs in Diane Boucher’s well-informed and useful biography. Bringing Cosway’s life ‘out of the shadows’ is hard enough, but to recover the artist proves frustratingly difficult. Did she have assistants and a studio? Did people sit for portraits? What did painting mean to her?

There’s far too much here about how charming other people found her and too little of Cosway’s own voice. When we do hear it – as in her pronouncement that Elisabeth Vigée-Le Brun’s portrait of Prince Lubomirski was ‘weak, poor, cheap, common, badly drawn. French in the composition, nothing in the concept’ – it comes as a welcome shock. The portrait on the cover, an engraving by Valentine Green of a self-portrait of 1787 (original untraced), shows a confident woman, arms folded, gazing directly at the viewer, no paintbrushes, palettes or canvases in view. Boucher suggests the pose can be interpreted as ‘both defiant and self-protective’. There’s a steeliness in the look, as if she’s working out what she makes of you. 

Maria Cosway was a child prodigy, born in Florence to English parents who ran inns for (mostly) English travellers keen on art and culture. Little Maria sang, played the piano and the harp, composed music and studied painting under the Florentine portrait and history painter Violante Siries Cerroti, as well