Catherine da Costa

Catherine Rachel da Costa (1679–1756), Mendes, was an English miniaturist. She grew up in London and studied painting under Bernard Lens III. Most of her surviving portraits are of family and friends, and there is also a picture of Mary Queen of Scots. Da Costa was the first female Anglo-Jewish artist of note. In her personal life, she married Moses da Costa and had six children.

Early life

Catherine Rachel Mendes was the eldest daughter of Fernando and Isabel Mendes, Portuguese Jews who had fled the Spanish Inquisition and married in London. Her father was doctor to both King Charles II and Queen consort Catherine of Braganza, having converted to Roman Catholicism. Catherine Mendes was baptized at Somerset House (but given the Jewish name of Rachel) and Catherine of Braganza became her godmother.

Career Catherine da Costa was taught to paint miniature portraits by Bernard Lens III and most of her surviving works are portraits of friends and family. These include a miniature of her ten-year-old son Abraham da Costa, which is now owned by the Jewish Museum. However, a full-length watercolour portrait of her father hangs in the Bevis Marks Synagogue and da Costa also painted the Imaginary Portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots (1542–1587), which hangs at Ham House in Surrey.

Da Costa was well-regarded as a painter and also impressed Voltaire with her wit when he visited London in the mid-1720s. He recorded an exchange between her and a priest in his notebooks:

Madame Acosta [sic] said in my presence to a cleric hoping to convert her to Christianity: "Was your God born Jewish?" "Yes" "Did he die Jewish?" "Yes" "Well then, become Jewish" — Voltaire title=Notebooks page 26

Gallery