Portraits of the colony

IN the 19th century, most Australian artists came from England or various parts of Europe.

IN the 19th century, most Australian artists came from England or various parts of Europe.

Some were distinguished before they arrived here, such as John Glover, and others obscure, such as Abram Louis Buvelot, who taught at an art school in Switzerland for a decade before migrating to Victoria and rapidly establishing himself as the leading landscape painter in the colony.

Not only Buvelot but others such as Eugene von Guerard and even Glover seem to have become better artists in Australia. It is not just that they were bigger fish in a smaller pond or that there were more opportunities but that they were somehow stimulated to greater things by the new natural and human environment.

Robert Dowling (1827-86), the first significant artist reared and trained in the colonies, illustrates the opposite phenomenon or, rather, the same principle in reverse: encouraged by his success here, he travelled to England; but, although he achieved some success there, his most interesting and original work was done in Australia. In this respect he was a precursor to Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and others.

Dowling has been a relatively unfamiliar figure, except for a few intriguing paintings of Aboriginal subjects, and the National Gallery of Australia's exhibition, with the well-researched catalogue by John Jones, at last allows us to understand the development of his career and the sources of his inspiration and artistic character.

Born in England, the son of a Baptist minister, Dowling accompanied his family to Van Diemen's Land in 1834 at the age of seven. Hobart was the second colony, after Sydney, and there were already painters, cabinetmakers and other skilled craftsmen in Tasmania by the time the Dowlings arrived. Dowling's father became a friend of the most distinguished artist there, Glover, who had been in the colony since 1831.

Young Robert grew up in an extremely pious but energetic and entrepreneurial family which was well connected throughout the colony. When he was still a boy he began a long apprenticeship as a saddlemaker and briefly set up his own shop before deciding he wanted to be an artist. The earliest works in the exhibition are surprisingly competent and refined portraits of family and friends.

Although impressive in a beginner, these qualities are not entirely surprising. Tasmania had already been home to some very fine portraitists, including Thomas Griffiths Wainewright and Thomas Bock, as well as Henry Mundy. A certain standard had been set that any aspiring newcomer would have to emulate.

Dowling claimed to be self-taught and it is clear from the early paintings that he had not learned to draw the figure properly. There would not be an art academy in Australia for another generation and one suspects the Reverend Dowling would have had reservations about drawing naked models of either sex. On the other hand, the young painter almost certainly had lessons from someone who understood the art of painting, for the early portraits demonstrate a grasp of principles that cannot be achieved unaided.

He knows that oil paint is applied from dark to light (the opposite of watercolour), that there is more impasto in light than dark areas, and that the shadow side of a forehead, for example, can be made of little more than the dark underpainting. It seems likely the young artist was initiated into oil painting by Mundy, who was a family friend. At the same time, there is an unmistakable sense of the miniaturist about these pictures, in the scale and the degree of finish of the faces and in the fact he has learned how to paint only head and shoulders.

It is also hard to overlook the influence of photography, and there is something slightly frozen about the portraits that suggests a photographic source. Bock, who died in 1855, was clearly an inspiration, and is probably the source of the miniaturist quality of Dowling's early portrait work. The connection is corroborated by the series of copies Dowling made after Bock's 1830s watercolour portraits of the last full-blood Tasmanian Aborigines.

After these copies, Dowling painted a series of similarly small portraits, this time from life, of Victorian Aborigines. These pictures are studies for more ambitious compositions on which the young painter was hoping to establish his career but, as Jones demonstrates, the choice of subject matter also reflects the deeply ethical concerns of Dowling's Baptist milieu for the welfare of the native people.

The first of these compositions -- group portraits rather than history paintings -- is Minjah in the Old Time (1856), in which all his Victorian portraits are assembled around a campfire, with a handsome homestead in the background. The heads are almost all reproduced in the same angles as the studies, and as there are figures looking inwards at either side, we can assume the artist had conceived the layout of the picture before undertaking the head studies.

Nonetheless, the figures are stiff, and reveal once again that the young painter's competence does not extend much beyond head and shoulders; he has little idea of anatomy or the structure of draperies, which are thin and in some areas apparently unfinished. The whole thing has an awkward and distinctly provincial appearance that adds to the poignancy of the image.

After this and another variant drawing on the Victorian material, Dowling must have come up with the idea of using the heads copied from Bock in a similar way; this would not be simply a tribute to a people who were thought of as gradually fading away but a memorial to one that had all but disappeared. The first composition, Tasmanian Aborigines (1856-57), is not entirely successful, with its inexplicably grinning figure surrounded by grave or pensive ones.

In the enormous second version painted in London, Aborigines of Tasmania (1859), Dowling has put the grinning figure on the right, returning from the hunt. The others cluster around the fire in more credible attitudes, although the central figure clutching his knees looks a bit too much like a young girl at a picnic. The picture is roughly and thinly painted in many areas, with several visible pentimenti, in particular a spectacular one in the principal seated figure on the right: a ghostly silhouette showing through his cloak reveals that he was originally set much lower. Nonetheless, it is a large and impressive work, which was given to the Launceston Mechanics' Institute.

The following year Dowling painted a reduced version of the same picture, Group of Natives of Tasmania (1860), which shows an increased concern with anatomy: the rather clumsy reclining figure on the left is now more visible, his back is uncovered, and the superior understanding of the structure of the neck and shoulder suggests the experience of life drawing, although elsewhere the painting of the figure remains feeble.

One may wonder why Dowling took so long to make progress in this area; he had travelled to London with his wife and daughter, supported by a public subscription, in 1857 and enrolled at James Matthew Leigh's Academy. Perhaps the emphasis was more on contemporary genre subjects, such as Breakfasting Out (1859), the first of his pictures accepted by the Royal Academy.

Breakfasting Out is a pure example of Victorian anecdotal compilation. Around a tea-stall on a sunny London morning, the artist evokes a microcosm of society composed of isolated strangers pursuing their interests and appetites: an honest worker looking at a laundress or fruit seller with a basket on her head, a rich man gazing covetously at a pretty milliner, even a beggar girl who cannot afford tea with bread and butter. All are observed and analysed by the unattractive couple who own the stall.

Early Effort -- Art in Australia (1860), in contrast, is a quasi-autobiographical reflection on Dowling's beginnings in the colonies. A young boy in a painter's smock and a peaked cap sits at an easel, surrounded by his admiring family, and painting a group of Aborigines who pose in front of him.

Of course the picture is allegorical rather than literal. For one thing, Dowling was not nearly as young as this when he started his career as a painter. Nor did he paint his group compositions from life but, as we have seen, from head studies. Above all, there were no longer any full-blood Aborigines living in their traditional way in Tasmania.

It is notable, however, especially given the preponderance of landscape in Australian art, that Dowling associates the progress of art in this country with the portrayal of the native people. There is certainly the implication that his own inspiration originates in ideas of the noble savage. Perhaps he even recalled the story that Benjamin West, the American who became the second president of the Royal Academy after Joshua Reynolds, had spent time as a boy with Native Americans before arriving in Europe.

In London, Dowling became more confident and achieved success as a portraitist and a painter of biblical and oriental subjects. Some of these are extremely complex, such as his picture of a sheik returning from pilgrimage (1874); most of them are terribly literal and remind one of the colour illustrations in bibles. There is a truly dreadful Baptism of Christ that is enormous but apparently only a study for a much bigger work, now lost.

Interesting as these late pictures can be, they merge into the general production of average Victorian painters compared with the more naive but spontaneous works painted in Tasmania or immediately after his arrival in London, and still based on Tasmanian material. The most striking picture, in fact, was executed before his departure for England, and it is a shame that it, like the rest of the work, is not better reproduced in the catalogue. All the plates are too dark in general and lacking in tonal contrast, so the whites lose their brightness and the darks become muddy.

Mrs Adolphus Sceales with Black Jimmie on Merrang Station (1856) is a mourning portrait in which the widow, in deep black, stands beside her dark horse, while her husband's chestnut mare is held, on the other side of the composition, by his Aboriginal groom. Mr Sceales's absence is recalled by his riderless horse, but because Mrs Sceales is dismounted, a strange symmetry is created between her figure and that of Jimmie, implying a kind of equivalence and emphasising the unbridgeable distance between the two figures. It is one of those images that persists in the mind because the vision is so distinct but the meaning tantalisingly elusive.