Robert Dowling

• Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston, TAS | 6 March – 25 April 2010
• Geelong Gallery, Geelong, VIC | 8 May – 11 July 2010
• Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, SA | 19 November 2010 – 13 February 2011

A travelling retrospective of Australia’s first home-grown artist

Robert Dowling was Australia’s first major colonial-trained professional artist. Within Australian art historical terms, this was a milestone of great significance. It may seem surprising, then, that the National Gallery of Australia travelling exhibition Robert Dowling: Tasmanian son of Empire is the first retrospective of the artist’s comprehensive body of work. This exhibition shows his portraits, including his portraits of pastoralists and their properties, portraits and compositions of Indigenous people, biblical subjects, social history subjects and his Oriental subjects. The exhibition opens on 6 March at the Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery in Launceston, Tasmania, where Dowling arrived in Australia in 1834 at the age of seven.

Dowling gave up his saddlery trade to launch himself as a professional portrait painter in Launceston in 1850. It was still pre-gold rush Australia, and our first locally formed professional painter emerged at the age of 23. Dowling made claims of being self-taught but, despite the fact that the colonies had no academies of art for formal training or public art collections to study, the young artist had opportunities to learn from other colonial artists, including Frederick Strange and Thomas Bock, and from the work of Henry Mundy.

In Tasmania, a balanced colonial microcosm of late-Georgian English culture supported sophisticated architecture, furniture makers, silversmiths, frame makers and, importantly for Dowling, a surprising number of portrait painters—as well as still-life, marine and landscape painters. Indeed, Tasmanian art from the 1830s to the early 1850s was richer and more diverse than that of any other Australian colony.

Dowling’s interesting early portrait oils and miniatures executed in Tasmania appear superficially sophisticated, yet their often oversized heads and undersized hands betray the fact that he was deprived of the benefits of academic training and life drawing. Even so, his understanding of modelling and use of colour at this early stage of his professional career and his grasp on the character of his subjects was already more advanced than that of many of his colonial forebears and contemporaries.

John Jones curated the exhibition and is the author of the accompanying book published by the National Gallery of Australia. The book is the first dedicated to the work of this central and critical figure in late colonial art. Jones delves into Dowling’s early career in Tasmania (1850–54), his time in Victoria (1854–57), his London years (1857–84), and his return to Victoria (Melbourne) (1884–86) before he died back in London in 1886. He is now placed highly as Australia’s major portrait and figure painter of the late colonial period of around 1850–85.

The exhibition has been sponsored by the National Gallery of Australia Council Exhibitions Fund, which is based upon generous personal donations from members of the Gallery Council made for the particular purpose of sponsoring special exhibitions. The publication has been generously sponsored by the American Friends of the National Gallery of Australia Inc, New York, with the special support of Dr Lee MacCormick Edwards.

The exhibition also has generous support from the Federal Government’s Visions of Australia and the National Collecting Institutions Touring and Outreach Program. I sincerely thank these funding bodies.

Ron Radford AM
Director

Robert Dowling (1827–1886) holds a special place in the history of Australian art. He was the first locally produced artist in Australia. He specialised in portraiture, but also painted popular genre subjects, literary and religious themes, the most substantial Orientalist images by any Australian artist of the time, as well as images of the Australian Aborigines. He was Australia’s major portrait and figure painter from the late colonial period 1850–85.

Born in Britain into a devout Baptist family, he migrated to Australia with his family aged seven in 1834 and was raised in Launceston. He worked in Tasmania (1850–54) and Victoria (1854–56) before travelling to London (1857–84). He remained in Britain for 27 years, exhibiting at the prestigious Royal Academy and regularly sending paintings back to Australia for purchase by institutional and private collectors. Dowling visited Australia in 1884, a highly successful artist. He settled in Melbourne but returned to London in 1886 with the intention of moving back to Australia permanently. This plan was thwarted by his sudden death. 

‘His own nature was … genial and sympathetic. He took a cheerful view of life, looked on the bright side of human nature, and was somewhat of a laughing philosopher’

(James Smith, The Argus, 14 July 1886).

Tasmania 1850–1854

In Launceston in 1850 Dowling launched his career as a portrait painter. He advertised that he was ‘prepared to execute portraits in oil and coloured crayons, as well as miniatures on ivory’. He claimed to be self-taught but it is believed he took lessons from Frederick Strange and Thomas Bock and was inspired by the portraits of Henry Mundy.

Dowling worked in Launceston but also took commissions in Hobart, regularly moving between the two cities. Among his portraits from this period are those of public figures such as the anti-transportation movement’s champions, W P Weston and the Reverend John West.

Victoria 1854–1856

In September 1854, with his wife Arabella and their infant daughter Marian, Dowling moved to Victoria. By November he was settled in Geelong, where he obtained employment with a commercial art gallery specialising in photography, and where he was responsible for painting oil portraits and tinting photographs.

From Geelong, Dowling painted portraits of pastoral families from the Western District of Victoria. Some of these show Aborigines in close social interaction with the European settlers. His portrait commissions include those from the Ware family, the McArthur family and Mrs Adolphus Sceales.

He also posed group images of the famous Victorian Indigenous elder Weerat Kuyuut and the Gunditjmara people of western Victoria.

He returned to Launceston in September 1856, and began painting a poignant series of historic recreations of the Aborigines of Tasmania. In London, in 1859, he painted a further work, Aborigines of Australia 1859, which he gifted to the citizens of Launceston in 1860. It has been on public display in Launceston almost continuously since then.

Indigenous subjects: 1856–1860

The images of the Indigenous people of Victoria and Tasmania are among the most significant works in Dowling’s oeuvre and the most potent for the modern viewer.

The Victorian images, such as Weerat Kuyuut and the Mopor people, Spring Creek, Victoria, were painted from life when the artist lived in Geelong. They were people known to the artist by name and are painted on their land. They worked for Dowling’s pastoralist friends and family in the Western District. These paintings portray Indigenous people adapting to the realities of the European invasion and the violation of their traditional lands.

The Tasmanian images were recreated history, their subjects mostly having died. Dowling based his portraits of these people on earlier watercolour portraits by Thomas Bock and developed them, in Launceston, and later in London, into elevated history paintings.

Dowling’s images suggest a sense of rapport and respect for his subjects and his intention was to honour the Indigenous people.

London 1857–1884

Robert Dowling travelled to London in 1857 to further his art studies and career. He studied at Leigh’s Academy and subsequently exhibited at the Royal Academy and the Royal Society of British Artists, playing up the exotic nature of his colonial background.

He painted popular moralising subjects from modern life; themes sourced from literature and history, and paintings based on the Bible. He created the most substantial Orientalist images by any Australian artist at the time, and visited Egypt and the Holy Land in 1872–73 to gain information for these and his biblical subjects.

During his 27 years in Britain he continued to send paintings out to Australia, many of which were acquired by private collectors and the National Gallery of Victoria.

Melbourne 1884–86

Dowling revisited Australia in 1884–86, and set up in Melbourne, the largest, richest, and fastest-growing city in the colonies. He had by then acquired a sound reputation, and he became the most highly esteemed portrait and figure painter in Australia. He received more than eighteen commissions of the Melbourne establishment, including one from the Governor of Victoria, Sir Henry Loch. He was involved in the city’s lively artistic community.

On the strength of this success he went back to Britain in 1886, intending to pack up his studio and return to Australia permanently. However, he died in London of a heart attack, aged 59. He was a distinguished Tasmanian son of the British Empire.