Julian Rossi Ashton CBE (27 January 1851 – 27 April 1942) was an English-born Australian artist and teacher.

Ashton was born in Addlestone, Surrey, the son of American amateur painter[1] Thomas Briggs Ashton, and his wife Henrietta, daughter of Count Carlo Rossi,[2] a Sardinian diplomat[3] who married the soprano Henriette Sontag.

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

Lambert showed Ashton, then 77, with white hair and a military-type moustache, dressed in a grey suit and a dapper bow-tie, cigar in hand, sitting beside a table with a mass of objects.

The cigar and wine suggest 'good living' and the flowers and fruit may have referred to Ashton's role as a gardener.

Julian Ashton students have included William Dobell, John Olsen, Fred Leist, Brett Whiteley, Justine Kong Sing, Anne Dangar, and Nora Heysen.

Ashton married twice: to Eliza Ann Pugh (died 15 July 1900) in Hackney, London on 1 August 1876, by whom he had four sons and a daughter.