Downloading jars from MavenCentral does not work

I am new to gradle. I have created a simple java project and when I run “gradle build” I get the following errors:

  • What went wrong:
    Could not resolve all dependencies for configuration ‘:compile’.

Could not resolve commons-collections:commons-collections:3.2.
Required by:
:gradleProject:1.0
Could not resolve commons-collections:commons-collections:3.2.
Could not get resource ‘https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/commons-collections/commons-collections/3.2/commons-collections-3.2.pom’.
Could not GET ‘https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/commons-collections/commons-collections/3.2/commons-collections-3.2.pom’.
repo1.maven.org

I have created gradle.properties file:
systemProp.http.proxyHost=proxyHost
systemProp.http.proxyPort=8080
systemProp.http.proxyUser=domain\user
systemProp.http.proxyPassword=password
systemProp.http.nonProxyHosts=*.nonproxyrepos.com|localhost

This did not help. Is there something else that needs to be done?