Temporary exhibition at Tiverton Museum of Mid Devon Life
Beck’s Square, Tiverton, EX16 6PJ
14 October – 30 November 2010
Tiverton Museum is mounting an exhibition to highlight the life and work of a man who was born in Tiverton and went on to become a celebrated artist. In his day Richard became more famous than Gainsborough through his portraits of the rich and famous. Both his large-scale pictures and his miniatures can today be seen in museums around the country, including the V & A and the Royal Collection.
Richard and his wife Maria, also a successful artist, established a salon in London that became a great meeting place for artists, musicians, actors and actresses, celebrities, politicians and nobility. This glamorous and intriguing couple, admired for their taste and fashion, deserve to receive today some of the fame that they achieved in their own time.
Tiverton Museum wishes to acknowledge with gratitude a gift to the museum by Commander Gerald Barnett of a collection of original prints by Richard and Maria Cosway. A selection of these beautiful prints forms the basis of this exhibition
Richard Cosway’s success grew from his prestigious talent in painting portraits, either large scale or in miniature. His career as an artist began in 1755 when he won first prize at the Royal Society of Arts in an open competition for boys and girls under the age of 14. He continued to win prizes from the Royal Society, eventually establishing his own business.
In 1781 Richard Cosway married the beautiful Maria Hadfield, at St George’s, Hanover Square. After only a few years they were living in great style in Schomberg House in Pall Mall, close to the Prince of Wales’ palace, Carlton House. They entertained ‘everybody who was anybody’. The royal princes were regular guests; the diarist James Boswell and Hannah Cowley, the Tiverton-born playwright, attended their functions. They covered their walls with works by old masters, including four large cartoons for tapestries, which he later gave to King Louis XVI of France.
The Cosways travelled extensively in Europe with commissions from nobility and royalty. Whilst on a trip to Paris they met Thomas Jefferson, then serving as the American ambassador to France, who immediately fell in love with Maria. The story of their relationship is told in the 1995 semi-fictional film Jefferson in Paris. The Cosway’s marriage lacked stability, especially after the death of their only child, Louisa, in 1796. Long periods of separation followed. Richard Cosway’s ‘Macaroni’ style of dressing and his eccentricities became more prominent as he got older, but the essayist William Hazlitt wrote’ we shall never see his like again’.
For further details, and photographs, please contact Pippa Griffith, Curator,
01884 256295 or curator04@tivertonmuseum.org.uk
Ann Draisey, curator of the exhibition, will be on Phonic FM’s the Early Bird show with Lee Rawlings on Sunday 14th November 8am -10am.