Portrait of Sir John Bowring, 1872

A portrait of Sir John Bowring, a clipping from The Illustrated London News, December 7, 1872. 

A simple black and white lithograph placed in an oval frame of a thin black line, showing a head-to-shoulder portrait of an elderly white man facing out to the right, with wispy ear-length hair and spectacles. He is wearing a dark jacket with high collar and buttons down the left-hand side, with three medals worn around his neck and one pinned to his right breast.

John Bowring (1792-1872) was born in Exeter and lived a varied life as a political economist, scholar, writer and translator, and was President of the Devon and Exeter Institution from 1860-1861. He served as MP for Kilmarnock Burghs, Scotland, between 1835-1837 and later for Bolton in 1841-1849. His early experiences in global trade, thanks to his wool-merchant father, developed his skill for learning new languages, later able to speak one hundred (according to John William Cousin’s 1910 biography.) A 2014 biography by his descendant, Philip Bowring states that: “Many of his contemporaries took the claims with a pinch of salt. Bowring’s linguistic abilities became the butt of jokes in some quarters, not only among his enemies.” Still, his linguistic talent aided him throughout his career, and he received accolades and honours across Europe for his translations and publications, and travels through Asia, being appointed British consul in Canton (now Guangzhou), 1849 and later Governor of Hong Kong in 1854. His demand for reparations from the Qing government led to the Second Opium War between Britain and China, and in 1857, the Esing Bakery incident, also known as the Ah Lum affair, took place, in which several hundred European residents were poisoned by arsenic-laced bread. Bowring’s wife, Maria, died as a result, and Bowring himself was left ill for a year.

In 1861 he took his last employment from the British government as commissioner to Italy, and later became envoy extraordinary for the Hawaiian government. These links can be seen in the portrait itself, whereby a number of medals pinned to his shirt and jacket, are likely the Order of the Bath (far right) and the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Bath (top) 1854, and the Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Order of Kamehameha I of the Kingdom of Hawaii (bottom) 1857. In this copy, the portrait and text have been physically cut out from a newspaper publication— likely his obituary in The Illustrated London News (7 Dec 1872)— and stuck to a plain page of paper. The original text ‘The Late Sir John Bowring’ has been cut and pasted to read simply ‘Sir John Bowring.’ The obituary attributes the portrait to a Mr. John Watkins, of Parliament-street, Westminster, drawn from a photograph. A bust of Bowring sits within the inner library at the Devon & Exeter Institution, the plaque reading: ‘SIR JOHN BOWRING 1792 – 1872 Traveller, Scholar and Political Economist President of this Institution 1860-1861 Presented by the Trustees of George’s Meeting 1983 Sculptor E. B. Stephens.’

Related Collections

Portraits