Emily Bowes
British artist (1806-1857)

Emily Bowes Gosse (10 November 1806 – 10 February 1857) was a prolific religious tract writer and author of evangelical Christian poems and articles.
Early life
Emily Bowes was born in London, England, to William and Hannah Bowes, both from old New England families. Her early years were divided among Merioneth, Exmouth, and London, and in 1824 she commenced work as a governess to Revd John Hawkins in Berkshire, later moving to the home of Rev Sir Christopher John Musgrave, in Hove.
Career
After these spells, Emily returned to London to stay with her parents in Clapton, North London. She attended the Plymouth Brethren assembly in Hackney, where she met her future husband, Philip Henry Gosse. They had known each other for several years before they married at Brook Street Chapel, Tottenham, in 1848. Emily was 42, and her husband was 38. Emily gave birth to their only child, Edmund in 1849.
It has been incorrectly claimed that Emily was a Victorian landscape painter who studied with John Sell Cotman, and an illustrator whose work includes the uncredited chromolithographs for the book of her husband P. H. Gosse The Aquarium: an unveiling of the wonders of the deep sea (1854).
Illness and death
In April 1856, Emily discovered a lump in her breast and went with a friend to confirm her concerns with a local doctor.
“Emily Bowes” enters the record as british artist (1806-1857). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Emily, Bowes and British can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Emily Bowes” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Emily, Bowes and British provides the most credible route into that argument.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3052360. VIAF identifies the subject as 59039363. The Library of Congress control number is nr2005017121. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1806, 1857, 1824 and 1848.
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This entry incorporates text from “Emily Bowes” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.