Ellis Rowan
Flower-hunting in the Tropics
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1321816600003354Keywords:
Ellis Rowan, flower painter, 'A Flower-Hunter in Queensland and New Zealand', intercolonial and international acclaimAbstract
Ellis Rowan was Australia's most celebrated flower painter of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An emancipated woman far ahead of her time, she turned what her fellow Australian artists deemed a ‘genteel’ female pastime of flower painting into an adventurous and profitable career which took her all over the world. In a career spanning fifty years and ending with her death in 1922, she produced the phenomenal number of more than 3000 paintings, and succeeded in placing many of these in public collections. Rowan exhibited her work as far afield as London and New York and achieved acclaim at intercolonial and international exhibitions of art and industry (with the award of ten gold, fifteen silver and four bronze medals). Also a skilled writer and publicist, she recounted her travels in the popular press and in a book entitled A Flower-Hunter in Queensland and New Zealand, published in 1898. This paper focuses on the artist's work in Queensland, a favourite hunting ground, and on her association with the tropics which was an essential part of her mystique.
References
Rowan, Ellis, ‘An Australian artist's adventures’, New Idea, 6 February 1905.
The artist's work and travels in Queensland are studied more fully in Judith McKay, Ellis Rowan: A Flower-Hunter in Queensland (Brisbane: Queensland Museum, 1990).
About the time of her Australian visit, Marianne North donated her collection of paintings to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, together with funds to establish a fine gallery to house the collection.
Ellis Rowan to Queensland Premier Digby Denham, 6 December 1911, QSA, PRE/A, 1926/5028.
Rowan, Ellis, ‘Making of an art collection’, The Oarswoman, Brisbane, December 1912.
Robert Bruce to Mrs (Professor) Alfred Cort Haddon, 4 September 1892, Cambridge University Library, Haddon Collection, packet 1006.
Frederic Rowan to Queensland Premier Samuel Griffith, 19 August 1887, QSA, COL/A, 1887/6819.
Rowan, Ellis, A Flower-Hunter in Queensland and New Zealand (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1898), p. 33.
Queensland Parliamentary Debates, of the Legislative Assembly, vol. 64, 30 September 1891, p. 1295.
Queensland Agricultural Journal, vol. 1, part 3, 1 September 1897, pp. 230–31.
Queensland Agricultural Journal, vol. 28, part 1, January 1912, p. 74.
G. H. M. Addison to Under Secretary, 14 December 1911, QSA, PRE/A, 1926/5028.
Godfrey Rivers to Queensland Premier, 26 December 1911, QSA, PRE/A, 1926/5028.
Rowan, A Flower-Hunter, p. 119.
Ellis Rowan cuttings book, National Library of Australia, MS2203, p. 13.
Rowan, A Flower-Hunter, pp. 10, 13.
Op. cit., p. 32.
Henderson, R. J. F., ‘Plants’, in McKay, Ellis Rowan: A Flower-Hunter in Queensland, pp. 60–61.
‘An Australian flower painter. Mrs Ellis Rowan’, The Queenslander, 10 August 1895.
Argus, Melbourne, 10 December 1904, cited in Judith McKay, ‘Ellis Rowan an Australian flower painter in New Zealand’, Art New Zealand, no. 88, Spring 1998, pp. 80–82.
Rowan, A Flower-Hunter, p. 6.
Op. cit., p. 24–25.
Op. cit., p. 40.
New Idea, 6 January 1905.
Casey, Maie, An Australian Story 1837–1907 (London: Michael Joseph, 1962), p. 106.
