Exhibition: From Josephine Bowes: Trendsetters and Trailblazers
Bowes Museum stages major exhibition on founding role of former actress and artist. Tony Henderson reports
The life of an actress and dancer was transformed when she met John Bowes, one of the largest land and coal mining owners in England.
The paths of Bowes, son of the 10th Earl of Strathmore and owner of the Gibside estate and the County Durham stately home of Streatlam, and clockmaker’s daughter Josephine Benoite Coffin-Chevallier crossed when he bought the Théâtre De Variétés in Paris, where she was an actress and they married in 1852.
For a time, the couple made their home at a chateau near Paris. They shared a passion for art and acquired a large collection that would ultimately be housed in the Bowes Museum they built in Barnard Castle.
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Now the museum is staging a major exhibition to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Josephine, an artist in her own right.
The exhibition, titled From Josephine Bowes: Trendsetters and Trailblazers, runs from February 8 to June 29.
The exhibition is organised into four thematic sections, presenting works from painting, drawing, film and photography to sculpture, ceramics, furniture and textiles.
Highlights from Joséphine’s expansive 18th and 19th century collections are paired with significant loans from 20th century European history and new works by leading artists today in the North of England.
Previously unseen paintings only recently attributed to Joséphine Bowes will also feature.
Joséphine lived at a time when Modern art and Impressionism were gaining momentum.
She was painting and collecting in 1860s Paris when the art world was being challenged by avant-garde artists like Monet, Manet and Courbet.
She experimented on her own canvases with styles used by these artists, painting in the forest of Fontainebleu just outside Paris, and on the Normandy coast. There are 60 pieces by Joséphine in the collection.
With access to a considerable fortune through her husband’s inheritance, within 10 years, she had defied many societal norms to become a pioneering collector and patron of the arts.
Vicky Sturrs, director of programmes and collections at The Bowes Museum, said: “Joséphine Bowes was an innovator and tastemaker, a collector of young and emerging talent, who amassed a founding collection of 15,000 objects encompassing fine art to ceramics, glassware to textiles, furniture to mechanical objects.
“Fiercely independent, Joséphine was unusually successful in navigating the dominant rules of gender, geography, class and taste, when she laid the first stone of the Bowes Museum in 1862.
“At the time, more early Impressionist works were purchased by the Bowes Museum than by the National Gallery, London.
“The driving force behind this new exhibition is the Bowes Museum reflecting on its founders’ vision and what it means to be a collecting institution at the forefront of artistic trends for the North of England and beyond.
“How, 200 years on, should Joséphine’s pioneering vision to create a public museum for everyone live on today and for future generations?”
Th exhibition will present works spanning 300 years, and features more than 60 artists, designers, and makers shaping trends in western culture today.
The first section of the exhibition is dedicated to our relationship with nature, and includes one of Joséphine’s most accomplished large-scale still-life oil paintings, Fruit, Flowers and Vegetables, c.1860-1874.
This is paired with two new, previously unseen works, including a digital piece, Physalis, 2024, by David Lisser (b.1987), and a major commission for the exhibition by Pheobe Cummings (b.1981). From The Bowes Museum’s collection, Fruit and Flowers, 1866, by Henri Fantin Latour (1836 – 1904), also joins the display.