Mrs. Cosway, another of Angelica Kaufmann’s friends, and one of a very smart circle, first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1780. She was the daughter of an Englishman, or Irishman, named Hadfield, who kept an hotel at Florence, and sent his little girl to a convent to be educated. She wished to become a nun, but was dissuaded from that course by her mother desiring her company when her father died, and the family moved to England. It was Angelica Kaufmann who eventually completed the work of converting Maria Hadfield from a religious to a secular life. Her husband was an R.A., wealthy, and much admired as an artist. Mrs. Cosway, like her husband, painted miniatures, and was very successful. She also possessed a good deal of musical talent, and was personally attractive, so that between them Mr. and Mrs. Cosway made numerous friends and quantities of money, for Cosway had a keen eye to business, and could turn everything to account. Their receptions were noted, and were attended by artists, men of letters, the most exclusive of the fashionable world, and also by royalty. But all this splendour faded away when Cosway took up the cause of the Revolutionists in France. His friends turned their backs on him, his wife’s health failed, their only child died, and the last years of their married life were spent in a dull house in the Edgeware Road, London. After her husband’s death, Mrs. Cosway went back to her native country. In the closing years of the eighteenth century there were many landscape painters among women, but in the early part of the nineteenth century they declined, very few exhibiting at the Royal Academy. It was, however, a flourishing period for portrait painters. “Never before or since have so many lady artists obtained such honours in a most difficult branch.”[61] Mrs. Carpenter, who lived between 1793 and 1877, was pre-eminent among these, and was a regular exhibitor at the Academy from 1814 to 1866. Mrs. James Robertson was a clever miniature painter, and was elected a member of the Imperial Academy of St. Petersburg. She was also an exhibitor at the Royal Academy during the same period as Mrs. Carpenter. It was not an easy matter at the close of the last century and the beginning of the present to obtain instruction in miniature painting, and the women who excelled did so entirely by their own laborious efforts. Later on this branch of the art fell into desuetude. Flower and fruit painting came much into vogue early in the century. It is a curious thing that the amateurs of art should have fallen so much into the background in the first half of this century. In the last decade of the eighteenth century the amateurs were rather distinguished. There were numbers of “honorary exhibitors” between 1793 and 1800 at the Royal Academy, who seem to have been so described because they were amateurs like Miss Spilsbury, Miss Serres, and other ladies.