Self-Portrait as the "Chapeau de Paille"
Artist:
Maria Louisa Catherine Cecilia Cosway
(British, born Italy, 1759 - 1838)
Date: 1785
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions:
canvas: 36 1/2 × 28 1/4 in. (92.7 × 71.8 cm)
framed: 43 1/2 × 35 1/2 in. (110.5 × 90.2 cm)
Credit Line: Lent by the Gilcrease Foundation, San Antonio, Texas
Object number: L.2018.55.1
Label Text
In this jaunty self-portrait, Maria Cosway reimagines herself as Susanna Fourment Lunden, sister-in-law of the seventeenth-century Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens, who immortalized her in a famous portrait. That picture had already inspired the French court portraitist Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun, whom Cosway knew, to create a similar self-portrait.
Maria Cosway was born in Italy to British parents who ran several inns that were popular with British tourists. She studied at the Uffizi in Florence before moving to London, where she met her husband Richard Cosway, also a painter, and launched a career as a portraitist, history painter, and printmaker. She exhibited at the Royal Academy for twenty years and maintained one of the city’s most in-demand recurring musical evenings. Cosway later founded schools for women in France and Italy. She is also known for having an affair with Thomas Jefferson when the future president was ambassador to France in 1786–87.
(William Keyse Rudolph, 2018)
Maria Cosway was born in Italy to British parents who ran several inns that were popular with British tourists. She studied at the Uffizi in Florence before moving to London, where she met her husband Richard Cosway, also a painter, and launched a career as a portraitist, history painter, and printmaker. She exhibited at the Royal Academy for twenty years and maintained one of the city’s most in-demand recurring musical evenings. Cosway later founded schools for women in France and Italy. She is also known for having an affair with Thomas Jefferson when the future president was ambassador to France in 1786–87.
(William Keyse Rudolph, 2018)
On view
In Collection(s)
The San Antonio Museum of Art is in the process of digitizing its permanent collection. This electronic record was created from historic documentation that does not necessarily reflect SAMA's complete or current knowledge about the object. Review and updating of such records is ongoing.
This resource has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the Human Endeavor.
