National Library of Australia
The Flower Hunter | Ellis Rowan

An Officer’s 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.

Metrosideros sp. [New Zealand Christmas Bush]  c.1893 Living as an officer’s wife, isolated from friends and family, Rowan found the domesticity of married life ‘boring’; but, ever resourceful, and under her husband’s 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

[Ellis Rowan and her son Eric (Puck) Rowan] c.1886In 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

Orchids 1880On 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:

Marianne NorthMrs 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.

Tree Orchid and Forest (Dendrobium atroviolaceum)  c.1890–1892 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 habitat—to 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 Thornton’s famous florilegium, The Temple of Flora (1799–1807), 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.

[Gymea Lily (Doryanthes excelsa)]  c.1892All in all, the 1880s was a highly productive decade for Ellis Rowan: not only did she paint a number of rare species for von Mueller’s 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.