John Bowes (art collector)

[citation needed] His parents married at St George's, Hanover Square on 2 July 1820, with Lord Barnard, heir to the Earl of Darlington, as witness.

[3] The result was to make John Bowes officially illegitimate under English and Scottish law, which status came to matter more and more in the Victorian morés already coming into effect.

Educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge,[4] John Bowes pursued an interest in theatre, art, and horse racing.

As one of the largest landowners in England, he developed a number of business interests, initially concerning his extensive coal mine holdings.

Bowes left England for France, allegedly because he was not fully welcome in Victorian society as a person of illegitimate birth.

While in Paris, France, John Bowes met the actress Joséphine Benoîte Coffin-Chevallier (1825–1874), daughter of a clockmaker, a woman passionate about painting and collecting.

[8] Joséphine officially laid the foundation stone of the museum on 27 November 1869, but she was apparently too ill to do so physically, and merely touched it with a trowel.

In 1877 (marriage settlement 24 July 1877), Bowes remarried one Alphonsine Maria St. Amand, divorced wife of the Comte de Courten.

[9] The second marriage did not turn out well, and it appears that John Bowes was attempting to obtain a divorce from his wife from March to May 1884.

The remainder of his estate, not entailed, was largely devised to the trustees of his first wife's will (registered 1875) for the purposes of setting up the Museum.

Amélie was responsible for the cleaning and repair of all the paintings in store, and supervising everything in the Temporary Gallery in France before organising the shipment of cases to Barnard Castle.