Thomas William Bowler

Thomas William Bowler (9 December 1812 Tring, Hertfordshire – 24 October 1869 London), was a self-taught British landscape painter who lived for some years at the Cape of Good Hope, and published a series of views of Cape Town and its neighbourhood. He is notable for having depicted some 35 years of the Cape's history in landscapes and seascapes.

Bowler was born in Tring, Hertfordshire in 1812, the son of William Bowler and his wife Sarah Butterfield,

He landed at the Cape on 5 January 1834 as a servant to Thomas Maclear, the new Astronomer Royal, whose service he left in July 1835, taking employment with Capt. Richard Wolfe, Commandant of Robben Island, and remaining until the end of 1838.

Bowler then started offering his services in Cape Town as a "drawing master and landscape painter". He took up a position as drawing master at the Diocesan College, and from 1842 at the South African College. In the same year that he published his first lithograph, The Landing of Troops at Port Natal being covered by H.M.S. Southampton. This was followed by Four Views of Cape Town in 1844. He also planned an 1845 portfolio of prints Five Views of Natal, but failed to find sufficient subscribers. The originals were returned to South Africa in 1960 by Lord de Saumarez.

In 1850 he published The Anti-convict Agitation, a print of the large gathering held in Cape Town on 4 July 1849, objecting to the landing of convicts from the penal transportation ship Neptune.

In May 1854 he returned to England, where he received tuition from the artist James Duffield Harding, and was back in Cape Town in March 1855. He painted two historically important pictures of the start of the 1859 Cape Town to Wellington railway line, the first in South Africa; and another two of its opening in November 1863. Three of these paintings were published as engravings in the Illustrated London News.

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