Join us with Stephen Lloyd, the Curator of the Derby Collection at Knowsley Hall. In addition to his responsibilities for the art collection, natural history library, and the family and estate archives of the Earls of Derby, Lloyd has published extensively on Richard and Maria Cosway.

Watch the Recorded Fellow's Forum

Presentation Overview

On 22nd September 2022 the first ever monographic exhibition on the famous artist, musician and educationalist Maria Hadfield Cosway, together with a major accompanying catalogue in Italian, was launched at Fondazione Maria Cosway in Lodi (near Milan), drawing exclusively on the Fondazione's rich collection of paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, books, manuscripts and archives. The exhibition and catalogue have been curated and edited by three Italian art historians with eleven essays by external historians and art historians including by Stephen Lloyd and by Susan R. Stein on the Thomas Jefferson connection with Maria Cosway. Remarkably the exhibition and the catalogue have been designed by the secondary students at the Liceo Callisto Piazza, which is housed in the building owned by the Fondazione Maria Cosway and which contained her pioneering liberal arts' school for Lombard girls, which continued until 1978.

Stephen Lloyd’s Fellows Forum presentation will assess the contents and themes of the exhibition, and the accompanying publication, as it is actually presented in the building of Maria Cosway's celebrated school for girls, the Collegio delle Grazie, which she founded at Lodi in 1812.