Julian Ashton

Julian Rossi Ashton CBE (27 January 1851 – 27 April 1942) was an English-born Australian artist and teacher, known for his support of the Heidelberg School and for his influential art school in Sydney.

Ashton was born in Addlestone, Surrey, the son of American amateur painter Thomas Briggs Ashton, and his wife Henrietta, daughter of Count Carlo Rossi, a Sardinian diplomat who married the soprano Henriette Sontag. The family moved to Penzance, Cornwall shortly after, and lived at Burley Grove, Gulval. His father died in 1864, and around age 15 he began working in the engineers' office of either the Great Western Railway or Great Eastern Railway. There he remained for 6 years using his entire leisure time painting at South Kensington. He then went to Paris to study and began illustrating books. He also had considerable success as a painter, exhibiting at the Royal Academy of Arts and elsewhere.

Ashton emigrated to Melbourne in 1878 under contract to David Syme's Illustrated Australian News and lived there for 5 years before moving to Sydney.

Ashton is the father of journalist Julian Howard Ashton, who was also an artist, and writer and critic.

He had a background in the contemporary French realism of the Barbizon School, which emphasised painting en plein air (i.e. direct from nature, as opposed to studio-based painting), and which laid the basis for the Impressionist movement. As a trustee of the Art Gallery of New South Wales he championed emerging Australian artists of the Australian Impressionist or Heidelberg School, and the Gallery's decision to collect these works owes much to his influence. Ashton is known for his paintings Evening, Merri Creek (1882), A Solitary Ramble (1888) and others.

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