An engraving after a drawing of Maria Cosway; full length, kneeling three-quarters to the left beneath a tree. She is elegantly dressed with a plumed hat and has a book in one hand and a feather fan in the other. This is a proof without letters. The sheet has been trimmed within the platemark.

The painter Maria Cosway (see RCIN 653010, 653011) was a frequent subject for the drawings and prints of her husband, Richard, both in conventional portraits and ‘in character’. The title of this print, and that of RCIN 653015 (inscribed on their finished states) comes from John Milton’s pair of pastoral poems of 1645, evoking the pleasures of the active and contemplative lives. In L’Allegro (The Cheerful One) Maria is reading, seated in a garden with a fountain of Venus; she is wearing a sophisticated ‘city’ gown, with a feather fan in her hand. Although some of the details have been altered, her pose is essentially the same as that in a drawing in chalks by Richard Cosway of the couple seated together in a garden (Fondazione Cosway, Lodi) – a homage to Peter Paul Rubens’s portrait of himself with his first wife, Isabella Brant, the so-called Honeysuckle Bower that Cosway also referenced in RCIN 653010. In Il Penseroso (The Thoughtful One) Maria is wearing a simpler, ‘country’ dress and mourns over a dead bird on the ground. An earlier state of Il Penseroso was entitled Lesbia, as an illustration of the lines of the Roman poet Catullus on his lover lamenting the death of her pet sparrow.

Text adapted from Portrait of the Artist, London, 2016