Self-portrait

For five years the young Englishwoman Maria Hadfield sat copying the Old Masters inside the Uffizi, and in 1778 Florence's own art academy, the Accademia del Disegno, elected her a member. She was 18. This self-portrait dates from that same year, the work of a student who had just been recognised by the city's painters. She would go on to a busy London career under her married name, Cosway, showing mythological scenes at the Royal Academy and keeping a fashionable salon. Some of her most famous letters were written to the American statesman Thomas Jefferson, whom she met in Paris in 1786. Her likeness hangs in the Uffizi's long gallery of artists' self-portraits, the collection she had studied inside as a copyist.