Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Bowen, Thomas
BOWEN, THOMAS (d. 1790), engraver of charts, was the son of Emanuel Bowen, map engraver to George II and Louis XV, who published a 'Complete Atlas of Geography,' with good maps, 1744-7; an 'English Atlas, with a new set of maps,' 1745(?); a 'Complete Atlas … in sixty-eight Maps,' 1752; 'Atlas Minimus; or a new set of Pocket Maps,' 1758, 24mo; and a series of separate maps of the English counties, of Germany, Asia Minor, and Persia, between 1736 and 1776, of which Gough speaks with little approval. Thomas Bowen engraved the maps and charts of the West Indies, published by the direction of the government from the surveys of Captain James Speer; maps of the country twenty miles round London and of the road between London and St. David's, about 1750; a 'New Projection of the Eastern and Western Hemispheres of the Earth,' 1776; and an 'Accurate Map of the Russian Empire in Europe and Asia,' 1778. He contributed to Taylor and Skinner's 'Survey and Maps of the Roads of North Britain' in 1776. He died at an advanced age in Clerkenwell workhouse early in 1790.
[Gent. Mag. lx. pt. i. p. 374; Redgrave's Dict. of English Artists; Gough's British Topography, vols. i. ii.; Watt's Bibl. Brit.; Brit. Mus. Map Cat.]