At Her Majestys 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.
The
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
Queens cousin, the Ducess of Teck, who bought three paintings for
herself.
Mrs Rowans work is characterised by exquisite purity of tone without
feebleness, and the most brilliant colour without harshnesseach
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.
Following
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 Movementart for arts
sakea 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.
Sometime
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.
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 Clausens 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 PanamaPacific
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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