A mezzotint after a self-portrait of Maria Cosway; seated, full face, with her body turned to the left. She wears a turban on her curled hair, and a white gown with a fichu. Set within a plain fictive frame. Inscribed below, in scratch letters: Painted by Maria Cosway / Engraved by V Green Mezzotinto Engraver to his Majesty and to the Elector Palatine / m.rs cosway / Published by V. and R. Green, Newman Street, Oxford Street, London, Sept.r 1.st 1787.

Maria Cosway executed a series of self-portraits during the 1780s and served as the model for many portraits by her husband (himself a prolific self-portraitist). This mezzotint, here in a superbly rich impression of an early state, reproduces a lost self-portrait by Maria, most probably that exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1787. She shows herself seated with arms crossed – an unusual and assertive pose – before an indeterminate twilight landscape; her elegant dress is offset by the large cross on a black ribbon around her neck, a prominent reference to her strong Catholic faith. Cosway makes no allusion to her practice as a painter: she simply presents herself as a confident and accomplished young woman.

Maria Hadfield was born to English innkeepers in Florence and studied there partly under Johan Zoffany, being elected to the Accademia del Disegno in 1778. The following year she travelled to London, where she married Richard Cosway; their homes in Pall Mall (RCIN 653010) and later Stratford Place became regular meeting places for fashionable society. Maria exhibited portraits and historical subjects at the Royal Academy of Arts during the 1780s; she was in Italy in 1790–94 and spent most of her time after 1801 in France or Italy, establishing schools in Lyon and Lodi and in 1834 she was created a baroness by the Emperor Francis I of Austria.

Text adapted from Portrait of the Artist, London, 2016