Walter Bowring, born and educated in Auckland, contributed cartoons to the New Zealand observer and The weekly press, exhibited with the Canterbury Society of Arts and studied with Orpen and John in London, where he contributed to Punch, before arriving in Sydney in 1925. Here, he exhibited with the Royal Society of NSW from 1926. Fourteen of Bowring's portraits were hung in Archibald exhibitions between 1926 and 1931, the year he died. The National Portrait Gallery has his portraits of Geoffrey Evan Fairfax and Sir James Oswald Fairfax, both painted in 1929.