Museum turns up the dial on pioneering art collector Joséphine Bowes | Art

“We would not be stood here if it were not for Joséphine Bowes,” said Vicky Sturrs, a curator, in a stupendously grand building that has one of the most enviable collections of art, ceramics and fashion to be found outside the UK’s capital cities. “I wouldn’t be employed in this job, this museum would not exist.”

The Bowes Museum has of course always known that the Frenchwoman Joséphine Bowes was an important part of its story, but the spotlight has more often been on her English landowner husband, John Bowes.

“Joséphine had a bigger role than we’ve ever made visible,” Sturrs said. “In the coming years we are going to turn up the dial on who Joséphine was, why she built the museum, why she chose the things that she chose, why she collected what she collected and why she did it here.”

A new exhibition celebrates Joséphine at the museum in the Durham Dales that she created in the 19th century with John. It contains examples of her own paintings, works that she collected, and also radical and joyous works that curators think she would be collecting if alive today.

Joséphine, born 200 years ago, was an actor and performer at Paris’s Théâtre des Variétés when she met John. They fell in love and married and she became a pioneering collector and patron of the arts.

She collected 15,000 objects of astonishing variety, from art by Boudin and Courbet to the finest ceramics, glassware, textiles, furniture and mechanical objects. At the time, the Bowes bought more early impressionist works than the National Gallery.

Joséphine collected what she loved and hoped people would enjoy, but she was also open to advice. “She did collect things she didn’t like,” Sturrs said. “She was told by her dealers that ‘a collection of this calibre’ should really have a Goya. She didn’t like Goya.” It meant the Bowes Museum now has in its collection what has been described as “easily the greatest Goya portrait” in the UK.

Joséphine was the driving force in creating the undeniably grand museum in Barnard Castle. The museum’s executive director, Hannah Fox, said visitors often assumed the building was once a stately home. It wasn’t. It was built as a museum “for the people” and opened in 1892, after the deaths of Joséphine and John.

The exhibition aims to celebrate the “vision and the spirit” of Joséphine and includes work that curators think she would have been collecting today.

All the evidence suggests Joséphine was generous and open minded. “She was much more accepting of all sorts of different people and their lifestyle than Victorian society was,” Sturrs said. “The works in the show feel authentic to the person we think Joséphine was … she would be championing these works. This is Joséphine in 2025.”

The works include a pot by Grayson Perry and sculptures by Leilah Babirye, who fled her home in Uganda after being outed as gay. There are also four original photographs from a series by the Turner prize-winning artist Gillian Wearing for which she stopped people in the street and asked them to write down what they were really thinking. “I’m desperate,” says a smart-suited young man; “I’m depressed at the moment,” writes a person who is unsettlingly smiley.

The show includes a new commission from the artist Phoebe Cummings and ceramics by Lucy Waters, a winner of the north-east emerging artist award.

Sturrs, the museum’s director of programmes and collections, said the name of Joséphine Bowes needed to be shouted louder. “There is this assumption in history that a man must have been behind this, that a man must have been leading this. To be clear, this is not about erasing John. But it is about saying that Joséphine had an equal and at times more leading part.”