To celebrate the National Library’s exhibition The Flower Hunter: Ellis Rowan, guest-curator Patricia Fullerton expands on the importance of Rowan’s art
At the end of the nineteenth century, when most artists were seeking recognition for their large-scale figure paintings and heroic landscapes at the Royal Academy in London or the Salons in Paris, the esteemed ex-president of the Royal Academy, Lord Leighton, exalted Ellis Rowan’s watercolours of Australian flora at a prestigious London gallery. Midst many other glowing reviews, her work was also criticised for its botanical content: ‘To botanists and horticulturists the series should be very interesting, but … [it] is not to be called art’[Sketch, London, 20 May 1896]. It was not the first, nor last, time her work caused controversy in the art world. In the year after Ellis Rowan’s death in 1923, following a long and bitter debate fought publicly in the press and also on the floor of the House of Parliament, the Commonwealth Government purchased what had then become known as ‘The Rowan Collection’. As much as Rowan was a woman competing in a field largely dominated by men, and reaping rewards established painters felt they more justly deserved, the controversy again focused on her subject matter, raising the age-old chestnut: what is art?
The dilemma in appreciating Rowan’s work has always been that it falls between two camps: she combined botanical accuracy with an individual style that bordered on the romantic and, later, became boldly dramatic in colour and presentation. Over the years, her work has been largely represented by fussy Victorian posies, or inferior copies of her better-selling subjects which, at best, were noted for their fine decorative quality, exquisite colour and botanical accuracy. However, her later paintings, which are large in scale, bold in colour and often bleed off the picture frame, and most of which have not been exhibited since her death, show little of this fastidiousness. For almost 50 years Rowan (1848–1922) explored the world seeking exotic flora and fauna to paint. At a time when travel was rough and hazardous, she stepped on land where few painters had ventured before: from the tropical rainforests of Queensland and the remote parts of the Australian outback, her quest took her to New Zealand, the Himalayas, Europe, the United States, the Caribbean and Papua New Guinea. Today, over 3000 works in public and private collections testify to her prodigious output and her determination to paint as many, until then unknown, specimens: many of which have since become endangered or extinct. Throughout her life, her work was internationally acclaimed and even collected by royalty. Few Australian painters have been so honoured: yet it is hard to think of any that have been so maligned. Her many prizes include a gold medal in the 1888 Centennial International Exhibition in Melbourne, where she first incurred the wrath of Tom Roberts and Julian Ashton, who complained that she was a mere ‘dauber of pretty flowers’ and that her prize was ‘a direct insult to foreign competitors' [The Age, 1 August 1888]. Despite the accolades received during her lifetime, her works have mostly laid in the drawers of museums or libraries rather than hanging on the walls of art galleries. It was not until the 1960s, when her niece, Maie Casey, made an attempt to revive her image, that a rather childish book was written about her life, and some of her work was exhibited for the first time in Adelaide. It took a further 20 years before the first comprehensive biography was written by Margaret Hazzard, and the Australian art world started to reconsider her status as a serious painter again. Despite several catalogues and exhibitions since, in many respects, Ellis Rowan still remains enigmatic.
The mystery surrounding her is due as much to the lack of letters, diaries and other archival material pertaining to certain periods of her life, as it is to her own embellishment of the facts. In spite of claiming no recognised professional training, she was ambitious and plucky, and her privileged background opened doors without her having to associate with art movements of the day. Her life as an artist was enchanted from the start, and she took advantage of many family and social connections around the world. Born into the pioneering family of Victorian pastoralist Charles Ryan, her passion for botanical subjects derived as much from her father’s famous 25-acre garden at Derriweit Heights on Mount Macedon, as from her grandfather, the naturalist and bird painter John Cotton, whose sketchbooks she inherited at an early age. She was part of a powerful family network: her brother Charles Ryan became a distinguished Melbourne doctor and hero of the Turkish wars. Her sister Ada entered the British aristocracy when she married Lord Charles Montagu Scott, fourth son of the Duke of Buccleugh. Her cousin Janet Snodgrass married the Melbourne tycoon, Sir William Clarke, and her cousins, the Le Souefs, established the first zoos in Melbourne, Sydney and Perth. Her marriage in 1873 to Captain Frederic Charles Rowan, a British army officer and hero in the New Zealand Maori wars, was pivotal to her career. A keen botanist himself, he encouraged her to paint native flora, and offered helpful criticism of her early New Zealand paintings. In 1877, Frederic Rowan became a prominent businessman in the hey-day of ‘Marvellous Melbourne’. As the corporate wife, Rowan accompanied him on business trips around Australia, painting for the government botanist and family friend, Ferdinand von Mueller, whose Latin annotations on the back of many of her works reveal the accuracy of her illustration. Then in 1880, Rowan met the English botanist, Marianne North, who travelled the world alone painting exotic species. Their meeting in Albany, on the south coast of Western Australia, had a profound effect on both artists. Rowan’s style changed and her lust for solo travel began:
Petite, feisty and always dressed immaculately in Victorian finery, with a flowing skirt and long-sleeved blouse nipped in to emphasise her wasp waist, this intrepid explorer now set out in pursuit of new subjects for her brush. Viewing her works today it is hard to imagine the conditions under which they were often painted. In her exaggerated memoirs, A Flower-Hunter in Queensland and New Zealand, (1898), she refers to sunburn, mosquito bites and fevers, to perilous expeditions by steamboat, rail or horse-back, to dangling by rope over a precipice to capture some rare orchid, and to hair-raising encounters with snakes and crocodiles. The explorer who revelled in remote and inhospitable parts of the world was also a canny operator back in her home town, able to use her social connections in Melbourne society to good effect. A frequent guest of her cousin, Lady Janet Clarke, she added to the decoration of grand mansions such as Cliveden and Rupertswood, as well as the prestigious gentlemen’s institution, The Australian Club—an unlikely commission for a woman in the 1890s, given the predominance of well-known male artists at the time. Her sister, Lady Scott, helped secure the successful exhibition at the prestigious Dowdeswell Gallery in London, where her work was praised by leading authorities in the British art world. She met Queen Victoria who accepted three of her works for a screen. Her friendship with Baron von Mueller led to an introduction to the German Chancellor, Prince von Bismarck, whom she claimed wanted to buy all her paintings, and who extended an invitation for her to remain in the country as its botanical artist. Instead, she went to America where she stayed for seven years, illustrating with Alice Lounsberry three publications on American flowers and trees which became standard texts for botany students. As a good exponent of the ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ Aesthetic Movement, she made her own lace, painted screens, murals and other decorative images, and in her later years she produced designs of Australian native plants and birds of paradise for the Royal Worcester Porcelain Company in England.
Despite her considerable energy and determination, Ellis Rowan was unable to achieve her ultimate goal of finding a permanent home for her work during her lifetime. Suffering from the effects of malaria, she spent her final years negotiating to sell her large collection to the Commonwealth Government. Once again she encountered fierce jealousy from her male colleagues, including the painter of voluptuous nudes, Norman Lindsay, who, ironically, called her works ‘vulgar’. Then, in the year after Ellis Rowan’s death, the Commonwealth Government paid £5000 for 947 works, £16,000 short of the asking price. These works, housed since then in the collection of the National Library of Australia, are the source and inspiration for the exhibition The Flower Hunter: Ellis Rowan. Augmented by items from private and other collections, many of these works have never been exhibited before. From the early delicate botanical watercolours, to the large flamboyant studies of Papua New Guinean tropical plants, fungi, butterflies and birds, the full range of Ellis Rowan’s oeuvre is displayed and can be appreciated. PATRICIA FULLERTON is the guest-curator of the exhibition The Flower Hunter: Ellis Rowan, 24 October to 27 January 2003. The exhibition will tour to four States commencing September 2003 with the assistance of Visions of Australia. The exhibition in Canberra is supported by Novotel Canberra, Win Television and Porters Original Paints |
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