Maria Cosway - Relationship With Thomas Jefferson

Relationship With Thomas Jefferson

In August 1786, the Cosways were introduced by John Trumbull to Thomas Jefferson, who was serving as the American Minister to France in Paris. The widower Jefferson was 43 and Cosway was 27 when they met. After their first meeting at the Grain Market (Halles aux Bleds), Jefferson told his scheduled dinner companion that he needed to tend to official business so that he could spend the evening with Cosway at the Palais Royal.

Cosway and Jefferson shared an interest in art and architecture; they attended exhibits throughout the city and countryside together. He would write of their adventures: "How beautiful was every object! the Pont du Neuilly, the hills along the Seine, the rainbows of the Machine of Marly, the terraces of Saint Germain, the chateaux, the gardens, the statues of Marly, the Pavilion of Louveciennes... In the evening, when one took a retrospect of the day, what a mass of happiness had we travelled over!" Over the course of six weeks, Jefferson developed a romantic attachment to Cosway as they spent each day together.

Upon Cosway's departure for London at the insistence of her husband, Jefferson wrote her a 4,000-word love letter dated October 12–13, 1786. It has been called "The Dialogue of the Head vs. the Heart", in which he writes of his head's conversing with his heart, and the struggle between the practical and the romantic.

Scholars suggest that Jefferson was particularly partial to a romantic attachment at this point in his life. His wife had died four years before; he had just learned of the death of his youngest daughter Lucy; and his other two daughters were away at school. At least one account held that Cosway began to develop stronger feelings for Jefferson, but when she traveled to Paris to meet him again, she found him more distant.

A devout Catholic who did not want to have children, she worried about pregnancy. Some historians believe that nothing further developed in their affair besides correspondence. Since Jefferson was very discreet, no one knows for sure about their relationship. Their letters would continue for the rest of Jefferson's life after she contacted him again, following his ending his correspondence while he was still in Paris. Historians such as Andrew Burstein have suggested that the relationship was romantic mostly on Jefferson's side, and that Cosway was his opposite, more artistic than rational. Both parties saved their letters to each other. Before Jefferson left Paris, he wrote to her, "I am going to America and you are going to Italy. One of us is going the wrong way, for the way will ever be wrong that leads us further apart."

Cosway introduced Jefferson to her friend Angelica Schuyler Church, the sister-in-law of his rival Alexander Hamilton. Church kept up a correspondence with both Jefferson and Cosway in later life; her correspondence with them is held at the University of Virginia's archive.

At Monticello, Jefferson kept an engraving done by Luigi Schiavonetti, from a drawing Richard Cosway made of Maria. Cosway had Trumbull create a portrait of Jefferson which she kept in turn. The Italian government gave the portrait she commissioned as a gift to the American government, on the occasion of America's bicentennial in 1976. It now hangs in the White House.