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painter, was born in Essex, probably at Colchester, on 4 July 1827, youngest son of a West Country-born Nonconformist minister, Rev. Henry Dowling, and his second wife Elizabeth, née Darke. His eldest brother, Henry (1810-85), became a well-known printer, publisher, banker and philanthropist in Tasmania; another brother, Thomas, was an influential grazier in the Western District of Victoria.

In July 1834 Robert Dowling left England with his parents aboard the Janet bound for Hobart Town, soon to join in Launceston other members of the family who had migrated some years earlier. Rev. Henry Dowling established the first Baptist Chapel at Launceston in 1840 and his pastoral work was widely known throughout the island. Specifically, he espoused the causes of civil and religious liberty, the infant school, and (with John West, William Pritchard Weston and Richard Dry) the anti-transportation movement. Robert Dowling was brought up within this high-minded moral ambience. Little is known of his education except for an early apprenticeship as a saddler, a trade he practised in Launceston. At the age of twenty-two he married Arabella Dean; their daughter Marion Beckford Dowling was born in 1851.

George Carr Clark, an acquaintance connected with the Dowling family by marriage, recorded in a letter of 1853 that Robert Dowling, then aged twenty-six, had for some years been interested in portrait painting. Years later in London, Dowling painted Early Effort – Art in Australia (exhibited Royal Academy 1860: now National Gallery of Victoria) in which he presents himself as a boy in the bush painting the portraits of a group of unlikely-looking Aborigines outside his rural cottage, the youthful artist being surrounded by an admiring peasant family. Life was, in fact, neither so bucolic nor culturally isolated. Young Dowling could have had lessons from Frederick Strange , a portrait and watercolour painter working and teaching in Launceston in the 1840s, or from Henry Mundy , a portrait painter who briefly taught at Launceston in 1843. Writing in 1919, Alfred Bock claimed that Dowling had studied with his (step-)father Thomas Bock , the foremost colonial portrait painter of the period, as well as with Rev. J.G. Medland , an amateur painter in oils. The best-known artist of northern Tasmania, John Glover , who had painted Rev. Henry Dowling baptising in the Ouse River in 1838, would obviously have been known to his son.

Of real importance considering Robert Dowling’s later subject paintings was his father’s friendship with John West (1809-73), historian, anti-transportationist and one of the moving spirits in the colony, who had delivered a lecture at Launceston in 1848 propounding the Ruskinian view of art as an active moral force for good. Robert Dowling painted John West’s portrait in 1851, having embarked on a career as a professional painter in 1850 with his father’s encouragement. He advertised as an art teacher, portrait and miniature painter in the Launceston press and after 1852 also in Hobart Town. The portraits he showed in the 1851 Launceston Exhibition were considered 'PROMISES of what his genius may effect … favourable specimens of the apprentice, not master’s hand’. Among the commissions of this period that can be ascribed to him are Launceston portraits of Mr and Mrs William Field (c.1850) and Hobart Town portraits of Mr and Mrs Charles Buckland, their daughter Elizabeth Fleming and grandson Henry Fleming (c.1853, VDL Folk Museum, formerly attributed to Thomas Bock).

On 18 August 1852 Robert Dowling left Launceston with his family and made his first visit to Victoria. He made another visit in about 1856, working in and around Melbourne. Mr and Mrs Charles Kernot sat for him, as did the first Anglican Bishop of Melbourne, the Right Rev. Charles Perry (known only through an engraving). He visited the Western District of Victoria and there executed numerous portraits of the Ware and Dowling families. The grazier Joseph Ware, of Minjah Station near Warrnambool, commissioned at least six oil paintings, including two group studies of the Victorian Aborigines, Minjah in the Old Time (c.1856, Warrnambool Art Gallery) and its companion piece, A Group of Natives of Spring Creek (University of Queensland), as well as Masters George, William and Miss Harriet Ware with an Aboriginal Servant (1856, private collection). Charles Kernot showed an Aboriginal subject by Dowling, A Native Group , at the 1857 Geelong Mechanics Institute Exhibition. An outstanding group portrait depicting the interaction of white and black in the district, Mrs. Adolphus Sceales with Black Jimmie on Merrang Station (1856, National Gallery of Australia [NGA]), was painted for Joseph Ware’s neighbour, the widowed Jane Sceales; 'Black Jimmie’ is the groom.

Robert Dowling and his family left Launceston for England aboard the Pharamond in April 1857. Aided in his ambition to become a major painter by a subscription from local well-wishers, he settled in London and enrolled at Leigh’s Academy in Newman Street. His London career was watched from Australia and he played to this market while also flattering the growing awareness of Empire in England. The Sydney Morning Herald of 6 September 1861 reprinted a review of Dowling’s Raising of Lazarus from the London Review (22 June), in which the reviewer emphasised the fact that Dowling was 'a young Australian, who has enjoyed few opportunities of study, except such as a distant colony afforded, and which we may venture to say would never have sufficed to the development of a good artist in the absence of true genius. But the very circumstances that would seem to militate against the artist, have really been favourable to him. Out of the influence of bad example, and the depressing contagion of conventionality, his originality has developed itself without becoming subservient to the pedantry or the craft of the schools’. The reviewer concluded that Dowling’s painting 'would scarcely be possible from a European artist, whose genius would be more or less warped by the contemplation of previous works representing the same incident’.

In Australia Dowling became known as the first example of a colonial artist making good in the Old World. Emphasising his background, he painted a number of works with Australian subject matter in London in 1859-60. The best known of these is his large painting of Tasmanian Aborigines, Group of Natives of Tasmania (1859, Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery [QVMAG]), based on watercolour studies executed by Thomas Bock in the early 1830s (a set of which Robert Dowling had from his brother Henry). Six oil on art-paper studies (National Library of Australia) and a preliminary oil study (Royal Anthropological Institute, London, on loan NGA) are known. The final painting, presented by the artist to the City of Launceston, was the star of the 1860 art exhibition marking the official opening of the Launceston Mechanics Institute building. A subscription list was opened for photographs of it taken by Henry Frith . Dowling also sent a self-portrait to the exhibition (1857, o/c, QVMAG).

He exhibited numerous works at the Royal Academy and with the Royal Society of British Artists in the 1860s and 1870s. Many were sent out for colonial exhibition and photographs of others are mentioned. The Sydney Morning Herald of 29 January 1861 reprinted favourable comments from the London Art Journal on Dowling’s The Presentation in the Temple , then being exhibited at Benjemann’s in Oxford Street, Sydney. From December to January 1862 it was shown at Hobart Town and in February at Charles Summers’s sculpture studio in Melbourne.

Dowling was the first to establish the pattern of expatriate exploitation of home patronage which became such a marked aspect of subsequent Australian art history. Some of his subjects were drawn from contemporary life, e.g. the anecdotal painting Grandfather’s Visit (c.1865, Ballarat Fine Art Gallery), one of four paintings he sent out to be raffled in an art union at Launceston in 1866 (won by T.C. Archer). True to his family background and High Victorian taste, he painted biblical scenes such as Miriam (c.1868) and The Baptism of Christ (exhibited Launceston 1865), themes from literature – particularly Scott and Shakespeare – and historical Cavalier subjects (e.g. The Consultation of 3 Elizabethan doctors, sold Christies August 1997, lot 148). In 1872-73 he visited Cairo, a favourite site for nineteenth-century European painters, and on his return painted his best-known oriental subject, A Sheikh and His Son Entering Cairo, on Their Return from a Pilgrimage to Mecca . This large picture was exhibited at the Royal Academy, then shown at Launceston and Melbourne. It was purchased by the trustees of the National Gallery of Victoria in 1878.

Dowling also continued to paint portraits, sometimes working for colonists visiting England or on colonial commissions. Major commissions from the City of Launceston were for portraits of the royal family: copies of Franz Xavier Winterhalter’s portraits of Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort (1862) and, 'from actual sittings’, full-length portraits of the Prince and Princess of Wales (1866) shown at the 1866 Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition before going to Launceston. (The Prince alone was seen in Sydney.) Dowling’s portrait of the Duke of Edinburgh (1869) was purchased in 1871 by the contractors for the Launceston and Western Railway and presented to the Mechanics Institute (now QVMAG). According to Henry Button , a photograph by Charles Woolley was the basis of Dowling’s oil portrait of Sir Richard Dry (1871, Northern Region Library, Launceston), presented to the people of Launceston by Dowling’s brother, Henry.

Now the possessor of a secure colonial reputation, Robert Dowling returned to Australia in 1884. He settled in Melbourne, opening a studio in the Mutual Providence building in Collins Street West and visiting Tasmania and Sydney. He exhibited widely, involved himself in the affairs of the Victorian Academy of Arts and received numerous portrait commissions from the Melbourne establishment. The best are of the Argus art critic James Smith (1884, La Trobe Library [LT]) and the Governor of Victoria Sir Henry Loch (1885, LT), the former being shown in the 1884 Victorians’ Jubilee Exhibition and the latter at the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London. Both were included in an exhibition of oil paintings Dowling held at the Launceston Town Hall in March 1885 where he showed seven of his own paintings and two by his pupils, Alice Grants and Miss Connolly. Dowling’s portrait of Sir Redmond Barry (1886, Supreme Court Library, Melbourne) is one of his last Australian works. He died in his Coleherne Road studio, London, on 8 July 1886, having returned from Melbourne in April aboard the Liguria . He was buried in the Brompton Cemetery.

Writers:

Jones, John

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011