José Vicente Barbosa du Bocage (1823, Funchal, Madeira - 1907, Lisbon, Portugal) was a Portuguese zoologist and politician. He was the curator of Zoology at the Museum of Natural History in Lisbon. He published numerous works on mammals, birds, and fishes. In the 1880s he became the Minister of the Navy and later the Minister for Foreign Affairs for Portugal. The zoology collection at the Lisbon Museum is called the Bocage Museum in his honor.
Bocage studied at the University of Coimbra from 1839 to 1846. He became lecturer of the chair of Zoology at the Polytechnic School, Lisbon (later the Science Faculty of the University of Lisbon) in 1851, where he taught for more than 30 years. In 1858, he became also the scientific director and curator of Zoology of the Natural History Museum of the Polytechnic School. which was established as a support for the chair.
His work at the Museum consisted in acquiring, describing and coordinating collections, many of which arrived from the Portuguese colonies in Africa, such as Angola, Mozambique, etc., sent by noted naturalists such as José Alberto de Oliveira Anchieta (1832–1897). For this purpose, Bocage standardized the procedures for collecting, preparing and sending specimens to the Museum in his book “Instrucções Practicas sobre o Modo de Colligir, Preparar e Remetter Productos Zoológicos para o Museu de Lisboa” (1862). In 1860 he succeeded in getting back some collections which were removed from the Museum during the Napoleonic invasion of Portugal, which include precious specimens collected by the French naturalist Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772–1844) in Brazil.
In 1875 he was elected Vice-President of the Academia Real das Ciências de Lisboa. He retired from educational and scientific activities in 1880 but remained director of the Museum until he devoted his remaining life to politics, first as the Minister of Navy and Ultramarine Possessions and later as MInister of Foreign Affairs, from 1883 to 1886.
Bocage published more than 200 taxonomic papers about mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fishes, and many others. He was responsible for identifying many new species, which he named according to the naturalist who found them (for example, dozens of new species received the anchietae apod).
José Vicente was a second cousin of the famous poet Manuel Maria Barbosa de Bocage (1765–1805). On April 10, 1905, a governmental decree renamed the zoological section of the National Museum of Lisbon as the "Museu José Vicente Barboza du Bocage".