Out of the Shadows

Diane Boucher was born in London and has an MA in History of Art from University College London. From 1998–2002, she was Research Director for the Commission for Looted Art in Europe. She later moved to the United States, where she worked at the Crab Tree Collection of American and British Arts and Crafts, and then at the Fralin Museum of Art, University of Virginia. She has published magazine articles and books on the arts and interior design. She lives in London and Suffolk with her husband and has two grown-up children.

"Diane Boucher’s captivating, intricate, and vivid biography of Maria Cosway – artist, celebrity, educator, and friend of Thomas Jefferson and Sir John Soane – chronicles one of the most intriguing women of her time. Cosway navigated considerable challenges in every aspect of her life within the complicated spheres of society and artistic culture in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain, France, and Italy. This is an important addition to our understanding of the era." – Susan R. Stein, Richard Gilder Senior Curator at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Monticello, Virginia"This new biography of Maria Cosway casts a new and sympathetic light on her as an artist, a muse and a pioneer of girls’ education, for too long unfairly overshadowed by her better-known husband, the miniaturist and arbiter of taste, Richard Cosway." – Tim Knox, FSA, Director of the Royal Collection"Diane Boucher’s sympathetic and thorough biography, the first monograph on Cosway, conveys her subject’s bounce and lovability as well as the poignancy of a turbulent career and a life whose conclusion was as unlikely in its way as its beginning." Rosemary Hill, London Review of Books