File:John Downer, politician, premier and federationist(GN01430).jpg

John William Downer (1843-1915) was the first of several generations of the Downer family to have played a significant part in South Australian and Commonwealth politics and parliaments. Trained as a lawyer, he entered the South Australian legislature in 1878 and held the seat of Barossa until 1901 when he was elected to the first federal Senate. He supported women's rights, especially regarding women's suffrage, marriage and property ownership. Downer participated in various federation conventions including that in 1897-98 where he argued strongly for the proposed Senate as a States' house, and against appeals to the Privy Council in the United Kingdom. He was a senator for South Australia from 1901-03, then elected to the South Australian Legislative Council in 1905 where he remained until his death in 1915. He has been described as 'a politician of strange contrasts': a man who regarded himself as a conservative but who held liberal views of the rights of women, immigration and the impact of white settlement on aboriginal affairs. (Peter Bartlett, 'Downer, Sir John William (1843–1915)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/downer-sir-john-william-6007/text10261, published first in hardcopy 1981, accessed online 20 February 2019.)

The portrait appears to have pasted into a collection of images of South Australian government ministers in the colonial legislature. The National Library has dated the same image in its collection (https://trove.nla.gov.au/version/228746890) as c1880.