Bowes Museum

The Bowes Museum is an art gallery in the town of Barnard Castle, in County Durham in northern England. It was built to designs by Jules Pellechet and John Edward Watson to house the art collection of John Bowes and his wife Joséphine Benoîte Coffin-Chevallier, and opened in 1892. It contains paintings by El Greco, Francisco Goya, Canaletto, Jean-Honoré Fragonard and François Boucher, together with several collections of decorative art, especially porcelain, textiles, tapestries, clocks and costumes, and objects of local historical interest. Some early works of Émile Gallé were commissioned by Coffin-Chevallier. A popular showpiece is a life-size eighteenth-century Silver Swan automaton, which periodically preens itself, looks round and appears to catch and swallow a fish.