Bessie Boyns was the second child and eldest daughter of Richard Boyns (b.c.1823) and his wife Mary (b.c.1826), of St Just, Cornwall, where all their children were born; John (1853), Bessie (1855), Marian (c.1860), Alice (c.1863) Gertrude (c.1866), Ernest (c.1868) and Richard (c.1869). In 1861 their father was a tin-mine agent, a role taken up by the younger Richard by 1891 when his father was described in the census as ‘Purser & Manager of Tin Mine & Farmer’. Except for John, the children were then all still listed in the 1891 census at their parental home, Boswedden House, Boswedden, St Just. Bessie’s formal occupation was given as ‘Organist’, which Kelly's Directory of Cornwall (1893) confirms as being for the Wesleyan Chapel, St Just. She also became a sculptor in wood and local stone, though with what training is not known, and a good landscape and coastal painter. Whatever artwork she sold, it is also clear she had private means and spent her later adult life living with her similarly independent younger sister Gertrude. The latter was a talented ‘Pictorial Photographer’, the occupation she gave in the 1901 census, in which Bessie called herself a ‘Landscape Artist’. Neither of them married.
Tozer’s long friendship with the Boyns sisters may have contributed to the separation with his wife that followed their daughter Marianne’s marriage to Osborne Percy Windsor, a Kingston-on-Thames ironmonger, in 1896. At the 1901 census Mrs Tozer was living with the Windsors at Kingston and calling herself a ‘widow’, though she was not: she died there in 1904. In 1901 Henry Edwin was living with the Boyns sisters in a cottage at Galmpton, near Kingsbridge in Devon, though as ‘head’ of his own household (comprising only himself) and Bessie as head of hers, with only her sister Gertrude. The 1911 census confirms that he was in fact a ‘Boarder’ with them. He and Bessie shared a final exhibition at Kingsbridge in 1912 and when he died at Galmpton the following year he was buried there under a granite gravestone carved with an artist’s palette, probably by her. Gertrude was buried beside him in 1928 and Bessie alongside both following her death in the first quarter of 1947.
There is some mystery in the Boyns/Tozer relationship, other than them clearly being friends. Tozer and his family moved from Kent to Cornwall by April 1888, initially to Newlyn, when he was 49. He may have done so only to paint but, since his stated profession at marriage in 1861 was ‘civil engineer’, it perhaps also played a part in the move and he may first have met the Boyns family in a mining connection.
Summarised from Art UK’s Art Detective discussion ‘Can anyone identify the signature of the artist of 'Wheelwright'?’
Text source: Art Detective
