Mid-Georgian Portraits Catalogue
Richard Cosway (1742-1821), Miniature painter
- Gallery portraits
- All known portraits
- Biography and References
Painter and virtuoso; principal painter to the Prince of Wales from 1785; ARA 1770, RA 1771; exhibited Society of Artists, London, 1760 and 1767-69, Free Society of Artists, London, 1761-66, RA 1770-1806; married 1781 the Italian painter Maria Hadfield (1759-1838) who later founded a girls’ college at Lodi.
‘The artist cultivated a highly fashionable personal appearance as a macaroni or dandy, which expressed both his highly extrovert personality and also may have been an attempt to conceal his physical shortcomings, both in terms of his lack of height and his pronounced facial features’ (Stephen Lloyd, 1995).
This extended catalogue entry is from the out-of-print National Portrait Gallery collection catalogue: John Ingamells, National Portrait Gallery: Mid-Georgian Portraits 1760-1790, National Portrait Gallery, 2004, and is as published then. For the most up-to-date details on individual Collection works, we recommend reading the information provided in the Search the Collection results on this website in parallel with this text.
‘The artist cultivated a highly fashionable personal appearance as a macaroni or dandy, which expressed both his highly extrovert personality and also may have been an attempt to conceal his physical shortcomings, both in terms of his lack of height and his pronounced facial features’ (Stephen Lloyd, 1995).
This extended catalogue entry is from the out-of-print National Portrait Gallery collection catalogue: John Ingamells, National Portrait Gallery: Mid-Georgian Portraits 1760-1790, National Portrait Gallery, 2004, and is as published then. For the most up-to-date details on individual Collection works, we recommend reading the information provided in the Search the Collection results on this website in parallel with this text.