Founding of the Bowes Museum (NZ056163)

The extraordinary mansion that is the Bowes Museum lies on the eastern fringes of Barnard Castle. Designed and constructed in the French Renaissance style, it is perhaps the North-East’s greatest oddity, being so obviously out of place. And, perhaps just as strangely, it is a purpose-built museum and has never been used as a residence.

It was the brainchild of a rather odd couple, too: the illegitimate John Bowes, a rogue branch of the family line that was to produce Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, and one Joséphine Benoîte Coffin-Chevalier, Countess of Montalbo (San Marino) who was an employee of a Parisian theatre. The two had met and fell in love during one of John’s long stays in the French capital, during which time he bought the establishment in which Joséphine worked. They were married in 1852.

John’s wife was big on art, and her husband soon came to share her passion. And so, around a decade into their marriage, they began collecting pieces of art for their own gratification and with the long term intention of establishing a public museum – funded by John’s coal industry dabblings. The collection soon grew to mammoth proportions.

It is simply assumed that John & Joséphine’s English base, Streatlam Castle (a few miles NE of Barnard Castle), became too small to house the collection, hence the necessity of a new purpose-built museum. However, it seems that the spectacular structure almost ended up at Calais…

The late Mr Bowes and his first wife, the Countess of Montalbo, when they formed the idea of founding a museum, did not originally propose to locate it at Barnard Castle. Their first idea was to place it at Calais, within the Countess of Montalbo’s own country, and yet looking towards England, Mr Bowes’ country. They abandoned this idea from a consideration of the permanently unsettled state of politics in France. They thought there was less chance of revolutions occurring in England than in France, in which the works of art might be injured. 

[from an account by Mr E.Y.Western, sole acting executor under the will of the late Mr John Bowes of Streatlam Castle]

It took years to bring the plan to fruition. It was not until 1872 that the building work commenced in earnest, but it then ceased in 1882 on account of a slump in the coal trade. In the meantime, Joséphine died in 1874 and John followed her in 1885 – but they made provisions in their wills for the completion of the museum. The establishment finally opened to the public in 1892 and was a massive success.

The Smithsonian Museum and its North-East Connection

I can’t possibly leave the subject of the life of the 1st Duke of Northumberland without claiming a neat little piece of glory for the region. For the very famous Smithsonian Institute and all its related museums and educational centres throughout the US owes its very foundation to the man – or rather, the man’s son.

Or, to put it more brusquely, the Duke’s illegitimate son.

The mighty American organisation was founded thanks to a bequest left in the will of one James Smithson, a British mineralogist and chemist, who died in 1829. Smithson had been a wise investor, amassing a huge fortune which he left, initially, to his nephew. However, it was stipulated in the will that if the beneficiary were to die without issue (which he thoughtfully did, in 1835), then the money should be passed “to the United States of America, to found at Washington, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.”

James Smithson – or Jacques Louis Macie, as he was originally known – was born in Paris in 1764 to one Elizabeth Hungerford Macie (nee Keate), following an affair with a prominent English landowner, Sir Hugh Smithson. Sir Hugh, who would eventually become the 1st Duke of Northumberland, was, at this time, married to Elizabeth Seymour, a Percy heiress, and had actually changed his name to Hugh Percy in order to inhert the earldom of Northumberland on his father-in-law’s death in 1750 – and would eventually be created 1st Duke in 1766.

Heavily influenced by his mother’s side of the family (his father, Hugh, never acknowledged him), James took the scientific route, being elected to the Royal Society in 1787 aged only 22. In 1802, a little after his mother’s death, he changed his name from Macie to Smithson. He died in Genoa in 1829, his remains being later moved and reburied in Washington D.C. at the Smithsonian Institution Building.

Astonishingly, James Smithson had never set foot in the US during his lifetime, and the reason for his bequest is unknown.