CANBERRA.- The first retrospective of Australia’s first major colonial trained professional artist, Robert Dowling (1827–1886), opens today at the National Gallery of Australia. “This exhibition, organised by the National Gallery of Australia, aims to place Robert Dowling in his proper place in Australian cultural history. When he first advertised himself as an artist in Launceston in 1850, he became the first locally trained Australian artist and went on to be the first to achieve success overseas. He was Australia’s most successful portrait and figure painter when he returned to Australia in the mid 1880s yet surprisingly he remains little known today,” said Ron Radford AM, Director of the National Gallery of Australia. The exhibition curator and author of the first book dedicated to the work of Dowling, John Jones said, “Robert