Emanuel Bowen

Bowen was a prolific engraver and map seller in Fleet Street, from about 1720 to 1767.

With Thomas Kitchin, he executed a fine set of large county maps first published 1749–55 and entitled The Large English Atlas.

These Bowen English County maps are noteworthy for they have the blank areas surrounding the county boundary filled with engraved text, describing the towns, their natural and manufactured products, situation and climate.

Bowen's smaller maps published around 1762 maintained the same layout and engraved description surrounding the county boundary, and also had very similar attractive pictorial cartouches. These appeared in The Royal English Atlas.

A still smaller series of county maps, with the same type of description, was published as the Atlas Anglicanus in 1767, and a slightly altered re-issue was published later in the century by Thomas Bowen, his son.

One of Bowen's finest productions was the beautiful Britannia Depicta, a work based upon Ogilby's road maps, but it incorporated history, heraldry and cartography, with a series of county maps, coats-of-arms, and notes filling every spare piece of the plate.

Among many other productions was a small simple series of county maps, each with a rococo cartouche, and bearing a date between 1759 and 1763. He also engraved a number of maps of all parts of the world, the first being a set of dignified maps each with a pictorial cartouche, in 1747, followed by another series in 1748 and two other issues of maps in 1752 and 1766 respectively.

Although he had led such an industrious life, he died in poverty, nearly blind, in 1767. His son carried on the business and the tradition of fine work, but seems to have shared his father's misfortune at the close of his life, for he died in Clerkenwell workhouse in 1790.