National Library of Australia
The Flower Hunter | Ellis Rowan

At Her Majesty’s Pleasure

The Queen has seen your paintings and … was much pleased with them …

—Letter to Ellis Rowan from Windsor Castle, signed by Col. John Clerk, 17 May 1895.

 

In 1895 Ellis Rowan embarked on a trip to England, which was to take her away from Australia for 10 years. Through the connections of her younger brother Cecil Ryan, and armed with a large number of paintings, Rowan made contact with royalty and, briefly, the elderly Queen Victoria herself. Asked to leave her pictures behind, Rowan received a letter from Windsor Castle within days of her visit:

The Queen has seen your paintings and … was much pleased with them … [and] has kept three. These the Queen will have made into a screen for her own room and there they will prove not only most ornamental but most useful to Her Majesty.

—Letter to Ellis Rowan from Windsor Castle, signed by Col. John Clerk, 17 May 1895.

Hibiscus heterophyllus [Native Rosella]  c.1892The following year, she staged her first solo show outside Australia, exhibiting 100 paintings of Australian wildflowers at the fashionable Dowdeswell Galleries in New Bond Street, Mayfair. A receptive public included the Queen’s cousin, the Ducess of Teck, who bought three paintings for herself.

Mrs Rowan’s work is characterised by exquisite purity of tone without feebleness, and the most brilliant colour without harshness—each specimen botanically perfect … created into a lovely picture.

The only objection we have is to the names of these wildflowers; it is to us little short of extraordinary that Mrs Rowan can be on terms of familiarity with a ‘Limnanthemum-exaltatumutricularia-didotomo-labillandra.

Sketch, London, 20 May 1896.

For the first time since the discovery of gold and infamous reports on convicts or bushrangers like Ned Kelly, the major Australian topic of interest in London was its wildflowers. Not only had Ellis Rowan become a good ambassador for her country, but she sold well, resulting in commissions for murals and oil paintings for prestigious addresses around London.

Alice LounsberryFollowing her successes, Rowan set off for a visit to America that lasted more than seven years. In New York, she met the young botanist Alice Lounsberry and together, over four years, they travelled the United States and West Indies, collaborating on three books which became standard texts for botany students: A Guide to the Wildflowers (1899), A Guide to the Trees (1900), and Southern Wildflowers and Trees (1901). 

What set Rowan apart from other flower painters of the time was her obsessive commitment, ambition and unabashed self-promotion, as well as her individual style and natural artistic flair. Like many of her contemporaries, her work incorporated the Aesthetic Movement—‘art for art’s sake’—a movement that embraced all things decorative, including the painting of screens, murals, designs for porcelain, illustrations for books and magazines, and other creative genres, including writing.

It was during the first months of this visit to America that she learned of the deaths of her father and also of her son, Puck, who died tragically, aged 22, in a gaol in Mashonaland, Southern Rhodesia.

Ellis Rowan with her mother and sistersSometime after hearing the news, she underwent a transformation with experimental surgery on her face. This ‘face-lift’, a new American fad, gave her what one reporter described as ‘the look of a sad monkey in a small childish face’ (Hazzard, p. 104). She not only changed her face, but dyed her hair red with henna, and also reduced her age by ten years, quoting her birth date as 1858 in The American Botanical and Historical Record.

Kangaroo paw [Anigozanthos bicolor] 188-?Except for some hyperbolic interviews in the newspapers, her years in America are probably the least documented of her life. After completing her work with Lounsberry, she continued to travel and paint throughout the United States. She held several exhibitions at prestigious venues, including the Field Columbian Museum in Chicago and Clausen’s Gallery, Fifth Ave, New York, where 500 paintings of her wildflowers of the United States, the West Indies, Australia and New Zealand were shown. In 1904 she travelled to the Mexican border and across the Sierras to California for the Panama–Pacific Exposition at Standford University. In spite of a later claim that she wanted her works to remain in Australia, during her stay she made many attempts to find a permanent home for her collection in America.

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