Robert Bowyer

Robert Bowyer (1758-1834) was an engraver originally connected with the Particular Baptist congregation in Meeting-house Alley, Portsmouth, and later with Baptist congregations in South London, primarily Maze Pond. Around 1790 he was appointed miniature painter to George III. In 1777 he married Mary Shoveller, sister of John Shoveller and members, like Bowyer, of the Portsmouth congregation; John Shoveller also practiced as a painter in London in the 1790s prior to becoming a Baptist minister (see Shoveller, John). Bowyer would later operate out of the ‘Historic Gallery’, a studio in the Pall Mall where he displayed not only his own works but also those of other famous painters, such as Benjamin West. During the 1790s, Bowyer grew fascinated with India, the result of his friendship with Warren Hastings and his interest in the activities of the Baptist missionary William Carey and his colleagues at Serampore and other locations in India and Asia. Two significant engraving projects by Bowyer at this time included Picturesque Views, with a Descriptive History of the Country of Tipoo Sultan (1794) (drawings by Robert Home) and Oriental Scenery: Twenty-Four Views in Hindoostan (1797) (drawings by Thomas Daniell). In 1806, Bowyer moved to Byfleet, Surrey, where he was instrumental in establishing a Sunday school, building a chapel, opening a day school, and doing occasional lay preaching in Baptist churches, besides painting portraits of George IV and other members of the royal family. Among his final works are a five-volume edition titled Works of Raffaelle, Domenichino, Poussin, and Albano (1819) and A Selection of Facsimiles of Watercolour Drawings from the Works of the most Distinguished Artists (1825). In 1801, Bowyer travelled to France during the Peace of Amiens on behalf of the BMS, a visit that eventually led to the formation of the French Evangelical Society. While in France, Bowyer collected prints and engravings of biblical settings and characters, the beginning of a preoccupation that would last for thirty years. These prints were eventually incorporated into what became known as the ‘Bowyer Bible’, a remarkable set of nearly seven thousand prints of engravings arranged into forty-five volumes, probably the greatest contribution by a Baptist to the history of pictorial art. The Bowyer Bible is now among the prized collections at the Bolton Museum in Lancashire. Another engraver worth noting is William Burgess (1754/5–1813), Baptist minister at Fleet, Lincolnshire, who produced an important series of engravings of the churches of Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire between 1800 and 1805.