Joséphine Benoîte Coffin-Chevallier

The Bowes Museum records that her father was a clockmaker.[3] She became an actress in Paris under the stage name Mlle Delorme. She was a vaudeville performer - an actress, comedienne, and singer - in the Théâtre des Variétés during the period when John Bowes purchased and managed the theatre.[4]

She found they had a mutual love of the arts, and it is believed that they began a relationship soon after they met in 1847. After their marriage in 1852 she retired from the stage to concentrate on her painting and art collecting, and she is known to have commissioned plays from playwrights.[5] As a wedding present, John Bowes bought her the former home of one of King Louis XV's mistresses, the Chateau du Barry.[6]

Coffin-Chevallier was a talented amateur artist who studied under the landscape painter Karl Josef Kuwasseg. Her work was exhibited at both the Paris Salon on four occasions in the late 1860s, and once at the Royal Academy, which was an unusual achievement for a woman of the time.[7] The Bowes Museum still holds fifty-five of her paintings in its collection, most of which are landscapes.

After her marriage to John Bowes she became a noted hostess, as well as a patron of the arts on a grand scale. The Revue Critique wrote of her 1860s gatherings of artists, intellectuals, and French society that 'the salons of Madame Bowes are counted among the most brilliant in Paris'.[7] She was celebrated for her taste in fashion and jewellery, and an 1872 bill from one of her visits to the foremost couturier of the day, Charles Worth, comes to the equivalent of £114,000 in modern currency.[8] She is known to have sold some of the most valuable of her diamonds in order to fund the completion of the Bowes Museum.[8]

In 1868 Bowes purchased the title of Countess of Montalbo for his wife, from the nation of San Marino, to elevate her status.[9]

In the 1860s, Coffin-Chevallier conceived the idea of founding a museum filled with the already substantial collections of her husband. Her vision was to create a place where the local coal miners and farmers could encounter fine art and improve their lives.[6]

She sold the Chateau du Barry, in order to raise funds for the project, and is widely credited by the museum as the driving force behind the project.[6] The pair began the collection specifically destined for a museum in Bowes' ancestral lands in Teesdale in 1862. The couple commissioned the architect Jules Pellechet, who had already worked with them in France, to design a museum in Barnard Castle, which was the town nearest to John's family home, Streatlam Castle.[10]

In the next twelve years, fifteen thousand objects were purchased to fill the projected building; as with other female collectors of the time Coffin-Chevallier collected pieces across a broad spectrum.[11] From the records that are left, Bowes collection archivists surmise that Coffin-Chevallier used her own artistic eye in collecting decorative arts pieces such as ceramics, silverware, and tapestries.[12] She also made extensive purchases from the International Exhibitions held in Paris in 1862, 1867, and in London in 1871.[3] Her purchases of paintings benefited from her friendships with young artists, and she also worked with two Parisian dealers, Mme Lepautre and A. Lamer, who left annotated records of their dealings, which are still held by the museum.[3] She purchased works by artists as diverse as El Greco, Cannaletto, Boucher, Anne Vallayer-Coster, Courbet, and Charles Joshua Chaplin.

At the ceremony to mark the laying of the foundation stone in 1869, Coffin-Chevallier reportedly said to her husband: ‘I lay the bottom stone, and you, Mr Bowes, will lay the top stone’. The museum building, in the style of a French chateau, was not to be completed until 1892.[13]

Coffin-Chevallier would not live to see it completed. She had experienced bouts of ill health since the 1850s, and died of lung disease at the age of forty-eight in Paris on 9 February 1874. Even in the last days of her life she is known to have spent time ensuring new items of the museum collection were sent to Teesdale.[14]