Creating the Bowes Museum

Abstract

This article examines the role of French antique dealers and the auction sales that took place at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris in the 1860s and 1870s in forming the sizeable collection of fine and decorative art of John and Joséphine Bowes, founders of the Bowes Museum in County Durham. Using primary sources published here for the first time, and presenting an extensive online Appendix of auction sales that appear in the archive at the Bowes Museum, it will demonstrate that the Bowes participated in a collecting network that was the product of a rapidly expanding art market in the second half of the nineteenth century. This argues against previous studies of the Bowes’ collecting, which have viewed them as singular and idiosyncratic collectors, and instead places them in the context of emerging private collections such as the Wallace Collection and public institutions such as the South Kensington Museum. However, rather than suggesting that the Bowes emulated private and institutional collectors such as Sir Richard Wallace and Sir John Charles Robinson, it is shown that the sophistication of the art market at this point allowed for diversity in collecting, allowing less wealthy and lower-status collectors to form collections of note.