---
title: "Joséphine Bowes: The Actress Who Built a Museum"
description: "Joséphine Bowes (1825–1874), a Paris actress turned painter, and her husband John bought some 15,000 objects and founded The Bowes Museum."
type: Person
url: https://teazle.art/people/josephine-bowes-actress-collector-museum
published: 2026-10-18
updated: 2026-10-18
author: "The Teazle editors"
image: https://cdn.sanity.io/images/jvxyxtrt/production/bd731979c64e21b2c2527e880f72b41bc3baf892-500x778.jpg?w=1600&fit=max&q=78&auto=format
image_license: PD
---

# Joséphine Bowes: The Actress Who Built a Museum

*Who was Joséphine Bowes and what did she collect? A Paris comedienne turned painter who, with her husband John, bought some 15,000 objects and laid the foundation stone of The Bowes Museum.*

![Full-length portrait of a young woman in a white silk gown with a red-and-white striped sash and a red cap, seated beside a gilt-edged table with a book, papers and a vase of roses, a large pale dog lying at her feet on a patterned carpet.](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/jvxyxtrt/production/bd731979c64e21b2c2527e880f72b41bc3baf892-500x778.jpg?w=1280&fit=max&q=78&auto=format)
*Antoine Dury, Joséphine Bowes (1825–1874), Countess of Montalbo, 1850. The Bowes Museum. The Bowes Museum. PD*

Joséphine Bowes (1825–1874) was a Paris comedienne who married her theater's owner, became a landscape painter and salon hostess, and drove the plan for a public museum in northern England. With her husband John she bought some 15,000 objects, from tapestries and porcelain to paintings by El Greco and Goya, and laid the foundation stone of a building she did not live to see finished.

## Who was Joséphine Bowes?

Joséphine Coffin-Chevallier was born in Paris in 1825, the daughter of a clockmaker. The Teesdale Mercury gives her birthday as 26 April and calls her the third of his daughters. At about twenty-two she was acting at the Théâtre des Variétés on the Boulevard Montmartre as "Mademoiselle Delorme."

The theater had a new owner. John Bowes, a wealthy Englishman, the son of the tenth Earl of Strathmore, moved to Paris in 1847 and bought the Variétés, according to The Bowes Museum. He and the actress met there. The Teesdale Mercury says they were a couple for about five years before they married in 1852, and notes that such relationships rarely ended in marriage.

![Full-length portrait of a young woman in a white silk gown with a red-and-white striped sash and a red cap, seated beside a gilt-edged table with a book, papers and a vase of roses, a large pale dog lying at her feet on a patterned carpet.](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/jvxyxtrt/production/bd731979c64e21b2c2527e880f72b41bc3baf892-500x778.jpg?w=1280&fit=max&q=78&auto=format)
*Antoine Dury, Joséphine Bowes (1825–1874), Countess of Montalbo, 1850. The Bowes Museum. The Bowes Museum. PD*

The 1850 portrait by Antoine Dury, two years before the wedding, shows her at about twenty-five in a Paris interior: a white silk gown with a striped sash, a table with a book and papers, a vase of roses, a large dog at her feet.

After the marriage she left the stage. John gave her the Château du Barry at Louveciennes, outside Paris, as a wedding present, and the couple furnished it together. The museum describes her as about five feet tall, determined and witty, and she corresponded with leading artists and dealers of the day. Her husband called her "Puss." Her health was fragile.

## How did a comedienne become a painter and a hostess?

She took painting lessons after the marriage and became a talented amateur. The Bowes Museum says she studied under the Austrian landscape painter Karl Josef Kuwasseg, that her work was shown four times at the Paris Salon in the late 1860s and once at the Royal Academy in London, and that the museum now holds more than fifty of her paintings.

One of them tells a small story. A Boulogne seascape was accepted by the Salon of 1870, and her friends teased her that it was "a portrait of your enemy." The Teesdale Mercury reports that she had a pathological fear of the sea, and that Channel crossings were sometimes delayed for days by her nerves. The nerves, it adds, gave her time to paint. The museum's blog and the Teesdale Mercury give this picture different titles, so we describe it rather than name it.

![Tall, narrow landscape: a curving gravel path runs between tall, slender trees toward a small white house with a pale roof beside a pond, glimpsed through a gap in the foliage under a blue sky; a tiny seated figure rests at the path's edge.](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/jvxyxtrt/production/8c2aa1cfc142e25b298cdb7c8b528372de4fd488-960x2068.jpg?w=1280&fit=max&q=78&auto=format)
*Joséphine Bowes, The Château du Barry at Louveciennes, France. Oil on canvas. The Bowes Museum, J.45. The Bowes Museum. PD*

She painted the house that John gave her. The picture of the Château du Barry is a tall, narrow canvas: a gravel path curves between slender trees toward a small white house beside a pond, with a small figure that appears to rest at the edge of the path. The Bowes Museum notes that she was also a leading Paris hostess and a patron of the arts, who commissioned plays and bought art before it became fashionable.

Another painter was working in the same Paris. Rosa Bonheur, born three years before Joséphine, held a police permit to wear trousers; [her permit](/people/rosa-bonheur-police-permit-trousers) shows what a woman in the arts could do in Second Empire France, and on what terms.

## What did John and Joséphine Bowes collect?

Between 1862 and 1874 the couple bought, in the museum's phrase, about 15,000 objects, mostly in Paris. Adrian Jenkins, then the museum's director, summed up the range in 2012: paintings and sculpture, but also ceramics, glass, furniture, tapestries and decorative objects of every kind, with notable German faience, Sèvres porcelain and Second Empire furniture.

The buying was fast and not always careful. The museum's archive blog records that at the Paris International Exhibition of 1867 they bought around 200 items, many of them showing daily life and the crafts of different countries. A dealer in Ghent, Rogiers, became a major supplier of pictures and [tapestries](https://teazle.art/glossary/tapestry.md), and the couple bought tapestries by the meter, whatever their quality or subject.

Some purchases look inspired in hindsight. In 1869 they bought El Greco's *The Tears of St Peter* for 200 francs, about £8 at the time. John had at first refused it until a dealer, Benjamin Gogué, talked him round. They also bought two paintings by Goya. Burlington Magazine notes that buying El Greco was "most unusual" for the period. The museum's press office adds another distinction: the couple collected works by living French artists, an unusual approach in Britain at the time.

| Year | What happened |
| --- | --- |
| 1862 | London International Exhibition: the couple buy a small porcelain bust, *The Bride*. Burlington Magazine dates the couple's collecting to 1862–74. |
| 1867 | Paris International Exhibition: about 200 items bought; they also see the Silver Swan automaton there. |
| 1869 | El Greco's *The Tears of St Peter* and two Goyas bought. |
| 1871 | London International Exhibition: Joséphine buys many objects, mainly pottery and porcelain. |
| 1872 | John pays £200 for the Silver Swan; Joséphine's Worth bill of 1 June lists five gowns. |

## What did Joséphine choose herself?

The records rarely separate the two buyers, which is the honest limit of this story. The museum's blog says that at the London exhibition of 1871 Joséphine "bought a lot," mainly pottery and porcelain, and Burlington Magazine says that the wife, an amateur painter, added contemporary works by Boudin and Courbet to earlier paintings by Boucher and Tiepolo. Beyond that, most accounts speak of "the Boweses." We have not found a ledger that assigns each object to one of them.

Her own part is clearer in the conception. The museum credits her with leading the project, and the founders' joint plan was a public museum, partly to improve the lives of workers in County Durham, as the museum puts it. The Silver Swan is a good example of the shared eye: the couple saw it at the 1867 exhibition and, the museum says, "fell in love with it." John paid for it five years later, in 1872, for £200.

## Did she collect lace and clothes?

Some lace, yes; costume, we cannot say. The Bowes Museum says its Blackborne lace collection builds on lace Joséphine acquired in the nineteenth century. That is all the exhibition page and press release say: no pieces, dates or dealers are named, and neither mentions costume she collected. Lace is a documented but unspecified part of her buying.

![A length of cream needle lace pinned over red cloth, with a scalloped lower edge and a design of large irises, ferns, grape-like leaves and sprays of small flowers over a fine net ground.](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/jvxyxtrt/production/fedf58e1145ace1fa42f725790a7a646720ccb53-768x512.jpg?w=1280&fit=max&q=78&auto=format)
*Flounce, Verdé, Delisle & Cie., ca. 1867. Brussels needle lace (point de gaze), length 298.5 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 43.37.1. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. CC0*

What we do have is a bill. The museum's archive holds copies of her accounts with Charles Frederick Worth, the couturier who also dressed Empress Eugénie. The bill dated 1 June 1872 records 11,184 francs spent in a day, about £114,000 in today's money by the museum's 2017 estimate. It covers five gowns, including one of lace and one of black velvet, two scarves and five items of lace. She also bought from milliners, glovemakers, shoemakers and haberdashers.

Very little of the clothing survives. The museum said in 2017 that most of her clothes are lost, with two bodices and a blouse remaining. The lace above is not hers and not from the Bowes Museum. It is a flounce of about 1867 at the Metropolitan Museum, made by Verdé, Delisle & Cie. in [Brussels lace](https://teazle.art/glossary/brussels-lace.md), a [needle lace](https://teazle.art/glossary/needle-lace.md) technique, and it is shown only as an example of fine lace from the years she was buying. To tell handwork from machine copies, see [how to read a piece of lace](/techniques/handmade-or-machine-how-to-read-lace).

![Oval portrait of a dark-haired woman in a pink off-the-shoulder gown trimmed with pearls, wearing a jeweled choker and a wide jeweled belt, holding a small book in her lap and looking to one side.](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/jvxyxtrt/production/e2f3bac3285dfcdaea0ac3b5356ecb54a7a372ca-500x635.jpg?w=1280&fit=max&q=78&auto=format)
*Louis William Desanges, Joséphine Bowes, between 1852 and 1860 (Commons date range). Oil on canvas, 94 x 73.5 cm. The Bowes Museum, B.M.529. The Bowes Museum. PD*

A second portrait, by Louis William Desanges, painted between 1852 and 1860 according to the Commons record, shows her in a pink gown with pearl trim, a jeweled choker and a wide jeweled belt. The museum notes her fondness for diamonds and showed a surviving belt of hers in 2017; we do not claim it is the belt in the painting.

## How did a museum begin?

The idea of a public museum took shape in the 1860s. In the museum's account, the couple sold the Château du Barry in 1862 and bought land in Barnard Castle, John's family town in County Durham. The archive blog adds that the 20-acre site was assembled from about a dozen plots bought over the preceding five years, starting in late 1864, with John apparently keeping his name in the background. In one letter he joked that the place was "intended for a Lunatic Asylum." The sources do not agree on the date the château left the family, since the same blog lists Louveciennes among the houses that held the collection in 1874.

The architect was Jules Pellechet, with John Edward Watson of Newcastle supervising on site. The museum's blog says the Teesdale Mercury reported in August 1870 that the design drew on the Tuileries and the town hall at Le Havre. In early 1871 Joséphine asked the ceramicist Émile Gallé about raising the roofs of the end towers; he agreed it would add splendor and asked whether she really wanted to recreate the Tuileries in England, which had burned during the Paris Commune.

On 27 November 1869 she laid the foundation stone in a quiet private ceremony, with an engraved silver trowel that is now displayed. The museum records her words as: "I lay the bottom stone, and you, Mr Bowes, will lay the top stone."

## Why did she never see it finished?

War came in July 1870 and the couple could not return to Paris for about eighteen months. Their collection survived, but the strain damaged her already fragile health, according to the museum's blog. She died in 1874, aged forty-eight. The History of Parliament calls her death untimely, and says it threatened to derail the project.

John carried the work on and died in 1885; neither founder saw the doors open. The Bowes Museum opened to the public in June 1892.

Her will asked for burial in a memorial chapel in the museum park. John began one in 1875, but it was abandoned in 1877 and rebuilt in the park only after a 1920 agreement. In July 1928 the couple's remains, which had been held temporarily at Gibside, were reinterred beneath a stone slab just outside the chapel's east end.

| Date | Event |
| --- | --- |
| 1825 | Born in Paris (26 April, per the Teesdale Mercury) |
| 1847 | John Bowes moves to Paris and buys the Théâtre des Variétés |
| 1852 | Marries John Bowes and leaves the stage |
| 1862 | Museum collecting begins; museum accounts date the sale of the Château du Barry here |
| 1867 | Buys around 200 items at the Paris exhibition |
| 1869 | Lays the foundation stone, 27 November |
| 1870 | A Boulogne seascape is accepted by the Salon; war interrupts the couple's return to Paris |
| 1872 | Spends 11,184 francs at Worth in one day |
| 1874 | Dies, aged 48 |
| 1892 | The Bowes Museum opens, in June |

## Where can you see her work and her museum today?

The Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle, County Durham, holds the couple's collection, her paintings and the Silver Swan. Its John and Joséphine galleries display the silver trowel. The museum's current programme continues the thread: *Lace and Legacy: Fashion Treasures from The Blackborne Collection* runs from 14 November 2026 to 11 April 2027 and, in the museum's words, builds on lace Joséphine acquired. The Blackborne collection itself came from lace dealers, so the show is about more than one woman's purchases.

Further reading: Caroline Chapman, *John and Joséphine: The Creation of the Bowes Museum* (2010); Howard Coutts and Sarah Medlam, "John and Joséphine Bowes' Purchases from the International Exhibitions of 1862, 1867 and 1871," *Journal of the Decorative Arts Society* 16 (1992).


## Sources

1. [Lace and Legacy: Fashion Treasures from The Blackborne Collection](https://thebowesmuseum.org.uk/exhibitions/lace-and-legacy-fashion-treasures-from-the-blackborne-collection/). The Bowes Museum
2. [The Bowes Museum unveils landmark 2026 exhibition programme (press release, 7 Nov 2025)](https://thebowesmuseum.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/07.11.25-The-Bowes-Museum-Unveils-Landmark-2026-Exhibition-Programme-Celebrating-Icons-of-Fashion-Art-and-Craft.pdf). The Bowes Museum
3. [Joséphine and John Bowes](https://thebowesmuseum.org.uk/visit/josephine-and-john-bowes/). The Bowes Museum
4. [The dream starts to take shape… (27 Nov 2019)](https://thebowesmuseum.org.uk/the-dream-starts-to-take-shape/). The Bowes Museum (Dorothy Brenkley)
5. [A Building of Love (25 May 2022)](https://thebowesmuseum.org.uk/a-building-of-love/). The Bowes Museum
6. [Joséphine: The Woman of Fashion (24 Aug 2017)](https://thebowesmuseum.org.uk/josephine-the-woman-of-fashion/). The Bowes Museum (Hannah Jackson)
7. [The Silver Swan Story](https://thebowesmuseum.org.uk/the-silver-swan-story/). The Bowes Museum
8. [The Bowes Museum Park and Gardens](https://thebowesmuseum.org.uk/the-bowes-museum-park-and-gardens/). The Bowes Museum
9. [Recent acquisitions at The Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle (Michael Marks Charitable Trust Supplement, June 2012)](https://burlington.org.uk/free-download/generic/2012-bowesmuseum.pdf). The Burlington Magazine (Adrian Jenkins)
10. [John Bowes (1811-85): the MP and his museum (19 June 2025)](https://historyofparliament.com/2025/06/19/john-bowes-1811-85-the-mp-and-his-museum/). History of Parliament blog
11. [Happy birthday, Puss (22 Feb 2025)](https://teesdalemercury.co.uk/features/happy-birthday-puss). Teesdale Mercury
12. [Josephine's painting of her 'enemy' drew great acclaim (9 Jan 2021)](https://teesdalemercury.co.uk/news/josephines-painting-of-her-enemy-drew-great-acclaim/). Teesdale Mercury
13. [Bride's head is revisited as part of museum collections](https://teesdalemercury.co.uk/news/brides-heads-are-revisited-as-part-of-museum-collections/). Teesdale Mercury
14. [Joséphine Bowes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9phine_Bowes). Wikipedia (used to locate references)
15. [File pages for the Dury and Desanges portraits and the Château du Barry painting](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Jos%C3%A9phine_Coffin-Chevallier). Wikimedia Commons

## Glossary

- [Tapestry](https://teazle.art/glossary/tapestry.md): Tapestry is a weft-faced weave in which coloured weft threads are worked back and forth only within their own areas of the design, hiding the warp completely.
- [Needle lace](https://teazle.art/glossary/needle-lace.md): Needle lace is lace built up stitch by stitch with a needle and a single thread, usually over a design laid down on parchment or fabric.
- [Brussels lace](https://teazle.art/glossary/brussels-lace.md): Brussels lace is a family of laces made in and around Brussels, including fine bobbin laces whose motifs were made separately and joined to a ground.
- [Couturier](https://teazle.art/glossary/couturier.md): A couturier is a designer or house that creates original garments to order for private clients; a woman designer is a couturière.

Canonical: https://teazle.art/people/josephine-bowes-actress-collector-museum