“IT must be remembered that thanks are due to my late wife as the idea and project of the museum and park originated entirely with her,” wrote John Bowes in 1874.
Usually when people think of the Bowes Museum, they think of him, Mr Bowes, the landowner, the coal owner, the racehorse owner, the castle owner, the MP who was one of the ten richest men in the country. Yet his diminutive French actress wife was the real driver of the project and so, to commemorate the 200th anniversary of her birth, she is given centre stage in the museum’s new exhibition, From Josephine Bowes: Trendsetters and Trailblazers.
“John is often given more of the credit, but the conceiving and making of the collection was largely down to Mme Bowes, and we wanted to turn up that dial and say ‘this is Josephine’,” says Vicky Sturrs, the Director of Programmes and Collections, standing beside a large still life, bursting with flowers and fruit, that was painted by Josephine herself.
On the next wall is a painting of the Women’s Land Army in the fields by Evelyn Mary Dunbar, the only female among the 37 full-time artists employed by the British government. Beside it is a digital still life by David Lisser, where the paint strokes are replaced by pixels, and in front of it is a specially commissioned work by Phoebe Cummings, a striking bouquet in raw clay dangling from the ceiling and drying and cracking before the viewers’ eyes – performance art an actress like Josephine would have liked.
“Josephine was collecting work by living, contemporary artists,” says Vicky. “She had 140 works by pre-impressionists – more than any London museum – so she gives us the remit to be a contemporary museum. She was the original trendsetter.”
Indeed, the most shockingly modern pieces are sculptures by Leilah Barbirye who was driven out of her native Uganda because of her sexuality.
“Josephine was a vaudeville actress, performing across genders, so she was bawdy, full of bants,” says Vicky. “She was living a lifestyle that was very much more accepting of all sorts of people than was Victorian society, so this feels authentic to what Josephine was – this is Josephine in 2025.”
Josephine was born in Paris on April 26, 1825, the daughter of a clockmaker. Little is known of her early life until around 1847 when she was earning a living as a vaudeville actor under the stage name of Mademoiselle Delorme at the Theatre des Varietes, which John Bowes, the former Liberal MP for South Durham, had bought.
John was the illegitimate son and heir of the 10th Earl of Strathmore, but lengthy court cases had stripped him of his title.
Fortunately, he was left with the family estates, including Streatlam Castle near Barnard Castle, and the family fortune. He had a successful career as a coal owner and politician, yet was always an outsider because of his illegitimacy.
To escape such prejudices – and some men of the turf who were angry about a bet on the 1843 Derby in which he had won £21,000 on his own horse – he slipped over the Channel to Paris, where morality was less strict and where he could indulge his love of art.
He bought the theatre because he fancied having a go at management and probably because he fancied one of the actresses. Then, aged 35, he spotted 22-year-old Josephine, and fell in love.
They married in 1852, and suddenly the whole world of art opened up for Josephine.
“Because she was the daughter of a clockmaker, we presume she had some level of schooling but we don’t know,” says Vicky. “As a woman artist, she couldn’t go to arts school, she couldn’t got to life classes and see a male nude. When she married John she entered into wealth and that made it a bit easier. She worked with a private tutor to hone her craft and became a well respected artist: she was chosen to exhibit three years in a row at the Paris Salon and even your Manets and Monets didn’t get into those exhibitions.”
Another of her paintings in the Bowes exhibition is a beautiful tall image of the Chateau du Barry on the outskirts of Paris that John gave her as a wedding present – it had been built by Louis XV for his mistress, Madame DuBarry. In the painting there’s a woman painting, as if Josephine has drawn herself into her work.
In England, married women rarely owned property, but in more liberal France, the chateau was Josephine’s property to do as she liked with.
“She chose to sell it to buy the land for this museum,” says Vicky. “Without that chateau, there is no Bowes Museum.”
She had conceived of the idea of using her husband’s wealth to amass a collection for a museum, and over the next ten years they bought 15,000 items. Ninety per cent of the invoices have Josephine’s name on them, so the choices appear to have been hers.
“She was carefully collecting for the public things she liked, things she thought people might enjoy, things that they would never have seen before, and she was bringing that European world view to Barnard Castle and the Durham dales,” says Vicky. “She was even collecting things she didn’t like – her agents told her that a collection of this size should have a Goya, so she bought one.”
As well as historic items she was buying from up-and-coming artists. She was buying works from impressionist painters before impressionism was even an 'ism'. She was very much a trailblazer.
It wasn’t just paintings she bought. In the ceramics section of the exhibition, beside a plate by Picasso and an urn by Grayson Perry, which she would have bought, are two French figures in regional dress, which she definitely did buy. They have holes in the backs of their heads as they are spirit flasks. Recent research has revealed they are by Marie Talbot (1814-74), a noted ceramist whose bottles and jugs are usually likenesses of people she knew in her village in the Loire region.
Getting her items to Teesdale was particularly problematic for Josephine, who had a deep-seated fear of shipwrecks. Another of her paintings in the exhibition is called Squally Weather and shows a foaming white wave crashing onto rocks – she knew it as 'a portrait of your enemy'.
“She had a really difficult relationship with the sea,” says Vicky. “John had to charter a boat to sail alongside the one she was on so she could get on to it if anything went wrong, and there are plenty of references of her waiting for weeks for the Channel to calm down before she came across.”
Josephine was bedevilled by bad health. When she laid the foundation stone of the museum in 1869 she could only tap it into place rather than give it a lusty blow because of a sprained foot. She died in Paris in 1874 of lung problems, aged only 48. She didn’t see her museum completed, and nor did John, who died in 1885, but such was the drive that the two of them left to the extraordinary project that it was completed in their absence in 1892.
“This is not to erase John but to say that Josephine had an equal, and at times leading, part,” says Vicky. “This museum would not have existed without Josephine.”
l From Joséphine Bowes: Trendsetters and Trailblazers opened last weekend at the Bowes Museum and runs until June 29.
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