Maria Louisa Catherine Cecilia Cosway

Maria Cosway is remembered as much for the men around her as for her own paintings, though she was a working, exhibiting artist in her own right. Raised in Florence by English parents and trained among Italian masters, she came to London and by 1781 had married Richard Cosway, the most fashionable miniature painter in the city. She showed her own history pictures and portraits at the Royal Academy while running his glittering salon.

In 1786, in Paris, she met the widowed Thomas Jefferson, then the American envoy to France. Their few weeks together produced one of the famous documents of his letters, the dialogue he wrote between his Head and his Heart, and a correspondence that lasted until his death in 1826.

Her last decades were the most solid. She left England, and after running a school in Lyon she founded a girls' college at Lodi, near Milan, and directed it for years. An Austrian emperor made her a baroness for the work, and she was buried at the school she had built when she died in 1838.