Work in England
On his return to England, Bonomi got married to Jessie, daughter of artist John Martin (1789–1854), in 1844. Now based in London, Bonomi's work included cataloguing and illustrating many Egyptian collections (including that of Samuel Birch); he also set up with Owen Jones the Egyptian Court at The Crystal Palace when it was rebuilt at Sydenham in 1854 and helped to arrange the Egyptian exhibits in the British Museum in London.
He published Nineveh and its Palaces and works on Egypt, Nubia, and Ethiopia, illustrated with his own drawings.
In 1861, Bonomi applied to become curator of the Sir John Soane's Museum. As this was normally a post awarded to a practising architect, he was only appointed after a fierce struggle and much criticism.
With his brother Ignatius, he built a house, The Camels, at Wimbledon in south-west London. He also invented a machine for measuring the proportions of the human body, and wrote a treatise, The Proportion of the Human Figure published in 1856.
Read more about this topic: Joseph Bonomi The Younger
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“How marvellous it all is! Built not by saints and angels, but the work of men’s hands; cemented with men’s honest blood and with a world of tears, welded by the best brains of centuries past; not without the taint and reproach incidental to all human work, but constructed on the whole with pure and splendid purpose. Human, and yet not wholly human—for the most heedless and the most cynical must see the finger of the Divine.”
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