Robert DOWLING

English 1827–86
emigrated to Australia 1834

By the 1870s the Wares were one of the thirteen families (Armytage, Austin, Carter, Chirnside, Cumming, Forbes, Hopkins, Manifold, Moffatt, Russell, Ware, Wilson and Winter-Irving) who held between them some one and a half million acres of the colony of Victoria.1 One of the perquisites of wealth was travel to the ‘Old Country’ and, on such a visit in 1882, Annie Ware, daughter of John Ware of Yalla-y-Poora (see p. 55), was painted by Robert Dowling.

Like the Wares, Dowling had a Tasmanian background. Youngest son of a Nonconformist minister, he arrived in Van Diemen’s Land at the age of seven. He became interested in art and in 1850 embarked on a career as a professional painter, specialising in portraiture. He came to Victoria in September 1854 in search of work and lived in Geelong until late 1856, making forays into the heart of the Western District and returning briefly to Tasmania before departing for England in 1857. The Dowlings and Wares were related: in 1842 Dowling’s brother, Thomas, married Maria Ware, a sister of the Ware brothers. The Thomas Dowlings moved to the Port Phillip District in the 1840s and eventually acquired Jellalabad station, to the north of Koort-Koort-Nong. Not surprisingly, many of the Western District Wares and Dowlings and their friends and neighbours sat to Dowling. (He also painted memorable portraits of members of the Western District Aboriginal tribes.)

Dowling became a successful artist in London, but still cultivated the colonial market. Visiting Australians like Annie Ware sat to him, and he continued to send out pictures. His magnum opus, A sheikh and his son entering Cairo, on their return from a pilgrimage to Mecca, 1874, was sent on tour to Australia in 1877 and was purchased by a committee of gentlemen for the National Gallery of Victoria the following year. During an extended Australian visit, 1884–86, Dowling took a studio in Melbourne and was kept busy with commissions.

1 P. de Serville, Pounds and Pedigrees: The Upper Class in Victoria 1850–80, Melbourne, 1991, p. 166.

Terence Lane