natural history painter, was born in Melbourne on 30 July 1848, eldest of the seven children of Charles Ryan and Marian, née Cotton. Ellis (as she was always called) had an upper middle-class girl’s education, including some tuition in watercolour painting, apparently from John Mather in Melbourne, and possibly private art classes in England (which she first visited in 1869), although she later claimed, with characteristic exaggeration, to have been entirely self-taught. Rowan began to exhibit her large watercolours of native flowers and plants at about the time of her marriage to Captain Frederic Charles Rowan (on 23 October 1873), mainly at intercolonial and international exhibitions of art and industry. Between 1872 and 1893 she won ten gold, fifteen silver and four bronze medals, starting with a bronze at Melbourne’s second Intercolonial Exhibition and ending with a gold at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. At the 1880 Melbourne International Exhibition, Rowan and another flower painter, Catherine Purves , received the only gold medals awarded to any artists from Victoria (although one was belatedly awarded to Louis Buvelot after an official protest from Melbourne’s male professional painters). In 1888 Buvelot was dead and, despite more protests, Rowan was the only painter in any Australian colony to receive a gold medal.

Since she had turned her back on the Victorian Artists’ Society and similar artists’ institutions, it is hardly surprising that when the Commonwealth Government decided in 1921 to purchase a large collection of Rowan’s paintings for a future national gallery the male art establishment complained. Professional painters said that it was totally unsuited for any public art gallery, let alone worth the £21,000 she was asking. (Norman Lindsay, ironically, called her work 'vulgar’.) The Commonwealth offered her £2,000 for her lifetime collection, eventually raising this to £5,000 – paid a year after her death. The collection remains with the National Library of Australia. When the National Gallery requested part of the old Commonwealth pictorial collection in 1993, it did not include any of the Library’s 947 flower paintings by her.

Rowan was immensely prolific. She did not document her paintings in an organised way, but her biographer Margaret Hazzard estimates that she painted well over 3,000 pictures. Her final exhibition, at Anthony Hordern’s Fine Art Gallery in 1920, contained over 1,000 exhibits, all for sale. It was said to have been the largest solo art exhibition ever held in Australia and to have made a record £2,000. She wrote and illustrated A Flower Hunter in Queensland and New Zealand (1898), published a children’s story about her pet bilboa, Bill Baillie, His Life and Adventures (1908), and provided illustrations for popular publications such as The Picturesque Atlas of Australasia (Sydney 1884-86) and New Idea (1905). She also painted murals and occasional oils. Her wildflower paintings were used commercially on Royal Worcester china. The William Henry Gill Papers (ML mss 285/13, item 1, pp.261-63) contains a prospectus, Ellis Rowan Pictures Limited , for a company set up to buy her 328 paintings for exhibition and sale in the USA, including info. re price of shares etc. (from Anita Callaway).

A tiny woman with an 'ultra-sweet voice’ Rowan’s appearance belied enormous physical stamina and absolute ruthlessness of purpose. She was as proud of her delicate, youthful appearance as she was of her trips to remote and difficult places, the one being exemplified by a face-lift in New York when she was in her early fifties, the other by two independent expeditions into the New Guinea Highlands to paint birds-of-paradise in her late sixties. Although helped by family money and connections, a steely determination and unashamed self-publicity, the fact that a colonial woman could make an international reputation from the despised female 'hobby’ of flower painting – normally consigned to an artistic 'no-man’s land’ without scientific, economic or artistic value – was a considerable achievement.

Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

Last updated: