An Officers Wife
In June 1873 Ellis Ryan became engaged to Captain Frederic Charles Rowan,
an officer in the British Army. Frederic Rowan had spent several years
in England undergoing facial reconstruction after being wounded in the
New Zealand Maori Wars before returning, via Melbourne, to become Sub-Inspector
for the Constabulary of Armed Forces in New Zealand. Four months after
meeting they celebrated their marriage at the Ryan family home in Richmond,
before settling in New Zealand at Pukearuhe on the North Island.
Living
as an officers wife, isolated from friends and family, Rowan found
the domesticity of married life boring; but, ever resourceful,
and under her husbands exacting but encouraging eye, she applied
herself to painting local wildflowers.
I was suddenly cut off from all social pleasures and for
the first time I was thrown entirely on my own resources … yet these solitudes
in which for months at a time we never saw a strange face, are among the
very happiest of my recollections…
Ellis Rowan, 1912
In
January 1875 Rowan returned to Derriweit Heights in Macedon, where she
painted for six months while awaiting the birth of her only child, Frederic
Charles Eric Elliott Rowan, known simply as Puck. Following the birth,
Rowan returned to New Zealand for the next three years before moving to
the marvellous Melbourne of 1878 with her husband. In the
following years she accompanied him on his business trips around Australia,
taking the opportunity to paint indigenous flowers wherever she could.
The task which I undertook at first to please him, soon
became my greatest interest and unfailing source of pleasure.
Ellis Rowan, 1912
On
her initial trips to Adelaide and Western Australia, Ellis painted delicate
bouquets of mixed wildflowers, which she exhibited for the first time
under her married name, Mrs F.C. Rowan, at the Sydney International
Exhibition in 1879, to win a silver medal.
During one of these trips in 1880, she also met the lone English painter,
Marianne North, at Albany on the south coast of Western Australia.
I became her devoted admirer, and she became the pioneer
of my ambition.
Ellis Rowan, 1905
North was equally fascinated by Rowan:
Mrs
Rowan [painted] ... most exquisitely in a peculiar way of her own on gray
paper. She was a very pretty fairy-like woman, always over-dressed, and
afraid to go out of the house because people stared at her. I admired
her for her genius and prettiness; she was like a charming spoiled child.
H. Vellacott ed., Some Recollections of
a Happy Life:
Marianne North in Australia and New Zealand, p. 66
She inspired Rowan with the notion of freedom to travel wherever and
whenever she could, not to mention ideas about writing of her adventures
and also of how to house and promote her works for posterity.
Although
there is no record, North seems to have encouraged Rowan in the technique
of oil painting and given her ideas about placing flowers in their natural
habitatto show surrounding vegetation in a landscape background
with atmospheric effects such as a brooding storm or a setting sun. Like
many botanical painters at the time, she was inspired by Robert Thorntons
famous florilegium, The Temple of Flora (17991807), which
encouraged artists to travel and depict exotic flora in Arcadian settings,
instead of academic illustrations showing root structure, seeds, leaves
and flowers on a plain background.
In March 1883, Rowan and her sister Blanche Ryan travelled to England
via India, where she painted in the Himalayan foothills. That year she
won gold medals in Amsterdam, St Petersburg and Calcutta.
All
in all, the 1880s was a highly productive decade for Ellis Rowan: not
only did she paint a number of rare species for von Muellers classification
but, with a growing sense of commercialism, she made several versions
of her more popular subjects for sale in exhibitions. During this time
over 100 engravings of her flowers and scenes were published, her watercolours
became bolder in colour and presentation, and she began to paint in oils.
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