He was largely engaged in mural paintings for churches, and specimens of his art will be found in the Abbey of St. Denis, in St. Paul at Nîmes, St. Polycarp at Lyons, the Oratory at Birmingham, the Church of the Celestines at Avignon, and in Strassburg Cathedral.
The Birmingham Oratory was to play a major role in the life of J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings, who was a parishioner there for about nine years during his childhood.
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They had two children, Charles Henry Bowden (1836–1906), a priest of the Birmingham Oratory, and Emily Frances Bowden (1833–1909), translator of Ida, Countess von Hahn-Hahn's Fathers of the Desert.