Thomas Bowler, was born in 1812, he was a famous colonial landscape artist in the early 19th century who painted pictures of events during the colonial era in South Africa. He was a self-taught landscape painter from England who lived in the Cape for 35 years publishing a series of views of Cape Town and the surrounding areas such as Stellenbosch, Hout Bay, Wynberg, Cape Point, Robben Island, and the coast of Cape Town. As such he was a pictorial historian of Cape society in the time before photographers, Bowler recorded many important events in the Cape’s colonial history. There are about 20 original watercolour artworks of the Cape and its surroundings at Ellerman House in Cape Town. He returned to the UK where he died in 1869.
