Botanical artist Ellis Rowan, wild flower in male-dominated art world
Botanical artist Ellis Rowan was once a household name. Now, a new biography brings her neglected paintings to new generations.
In 1880, Victorian botanical artist Ellis Rowan submitted 18 watercolour paintings to the Melbourne International Exhibition, a global showcase for art, science and technology that comprised exhibits from 30 countries and the six Australian colonies. Then 32, Rowan took out a gold medal, along with another female flower painter, Caroline Purves – and leading male artists including Julian Ashton, Eugene von Guerard and Louis Buvelot could barely contain their fury.
In her new, illustrated biography, Ellis Rowan: A Life in Pictures, author Christine Morton-Evans writes: “With full force, the professionals — who were part of the Victorian Artists Society — turned their ire on the judges. According to them, the women’s works were little more than artistic fripperies and were not worthy of being compared with some of the landscapes and genre paintings displayed by the male members of the academy.’’ Ashton, von Guerard, Buvelot and others demanded that the adjudicators rethink their decision, but Morton-Evans notes: “To their credit, the panel of international judges refused to be swayed.’’
Eight years later, an almost identical controversy erupted at the Melbourne Centennial International Exhibition, held to mark a century of European settlement in Australia. Rowan, a middle-class wife and mother who had no formal art training, once more took out the top prize – a gold medal – for a richly textured oil painting called Chrysanthemums, along with a host of other gongs.
Her wildflower paintings had already won 29 medals, including 10 golds at international expositions and exhibitions. Despite this, another posse of male artists – including Heidelberg School trailblazers Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton – objected to her second Melbourne triumph, characterising it as an insult to them and visiting foreign artists.
These protests reflect the deeply engrained prejudice that confronted Rowan, a self-described “intrepid lady explorer’’ who, against formidable odds, became one of Australia’s foremost flora painters, exhibiting internationally, illustrating books for American botanist Alice Lounsberry and counting Queen Victoria among her clients. “Obviously there was prejudice, more like envy, actually, from the (Victorian) Art Society, but it was also just the way life worked in those days,’’ says Morton-Evans, in an interview with Review. “Women didn’t even go to art schools, generally speaking, in the 1800s. … Women were known as amateur painters and they painted flowers from markets and gardens, which was basically what was accessible to them.’’
Yet Ellis, a tiny, exceptionally pretty woman who was always immaculately turned out, was a gutsy explorer as much as an artist. She travelled alone to the Outback and malaria-infested north Queensland rainforests in pursuit of wildflowers, fungi, moths and butterflies, and she painted more species of Australian and international flora than any artist of her era. As she turned 70, she travelled alone to the largely inaccessible jungles of New Guinea – the first Australian woman to do so.
Despite her lack of art school training, she was so skilled she could apply her paint without relying on pencil under-drawings. She also had plenty of networking nous: In 1895, she procured an exclusive meeting at Windsor Castle with Queen Victoria, who bought three of her works.
“It knew no bounds, her courage and boldness,’’ says Morton-Evans, a former model and counsellor. “In a world where Australians knew so little about their own country and were in awe of places like the Outback, they were enthralled by her adventures.’’ If the art establishment gave Rowan the cold shoulder, the general public had no hesitation embracing her, as she documented her exploits in newspapers and magazines and exhibited her works in India, England, Europe, the US and Australia.
Morton-Evans captures the startling incongruity between this ultra-feminine Victorian wife and mother and her gruelling frontier adventures: “The sight of this petite, elfin-featured woman, armed with painting gear and parasol, negotiating murky swamps and snake-infested jungles in full Victorian attire – whalebone corsets under a high-necked blouse, full petticoats under an ankle-length skirt, high-buttoned boots – amazed all who came across her.
“Her paintings and descriptions of nature, rich with colour, shape and texture, became enormously popular with a transplanted European population trying to come to terms with a country often seen as harsh and forbidding.’’
She was, as her biographer notes, also extraordinarily productive: “Her lifetime’s output of more than 3000 works was to rank her among the most prolific artists the world has known. When she died in 1922 there was hardly a household in Australia that was unaware of her name.’’
Yet today, despite the National Library of Australia holding more than 900 of her paintings, Morton-Evans maintains that Rowan is “all but forgotten’’. She says bluntly that while the Rowan collection is “very carefully looked after, people don’t really know about it’’. (Even so, in 1995, a collection of her butterfly paintings sold at Christie’s in London for $366,000, and her murals can still be seen in the Ellis Rowan Room at Melbourne’s exclusive The Australian Club.)
The Sydney biographer’s relationship with Rowan reaches back to a travelling exhibition of the artist’s work mounted by the NLA from 2002 to 2004 – it was promoted as “the first exhibition to show the art of Ellis Rowan in its depth and variety’’. By chance, Morton-Evans and her husband, Michael, saw the show while on holiday in Tasmania. They had never heard of Rowan, but were dazzled by her paintings. “I was just astounded,’’ Morton-Evans recalls.
The couple then spent years researching the botanical artist’s life and work, and in 2008 published their jointly-written biography, The Flower Hunter: The Remarkable Life of Ellis Rowan. “There was so much good stuff to write about, there was hardly any room for any paintings,’’ Morton-Evans quips of Rowan’s incident-packed life. This biography was shortlisted for the 2009 National Biography Award and was named after the artist’s 1898 book detailing her adventures; Morton-Evans notes that Rowan “was not beyond amplifying an account to delight or enthral her readers’’.
Two years ago, the National Library asked Morton-Evans to write an abridged, illustrated biography that would “emphasise and integrate more of Rowan’s paintings’’. This elegant book, released in April, is printed on thick, glossy paper, and features full-page illustrations of her watercolours, from wispy pastel specimens arranged as posies, to bold, lush depictions of hardy desert flowers and tropical flowers, fungi and birds. “She developed a unique style that matched aesthetic appeal with botanic accuracy,’’ Morton-Evans maintains, though the art establishment has never taken her seriously.
The illustrated biography is clearly an attempt to raise public awareness of the under-appreciated oeuvre of a once-famous artist, who, in spectacular fashion, defied the 19th-century archetype of the timid female flower painter.
Rowan was born in Victoria in 1848 to a large, well-connected Irish family of graziers. Her maternal grandfather, John Cotton, had been an illustrator and her talent was encouraged by her father and influential contacts including government botanist Sir Ferdinand von Mueller, who became a mentor to the novice painter.
Her life was not without profound sadness, as she outlived both her spouse and only child. In 1892, her husband, Frederic Rowan, a businessman and former army officer, died aged 47, ostensibly from pneumonia. There is speculation (which Morton-Evans dismisses) he may have committed suicide, because he was bankrupt when he died. While the couple spent long periods apart, Morton-Evans says “there is no suggestion in the letters that the marriage wasn’t fond; that there wasn’t a lot of affection between the two”.
She was a distant mother, however, and her son, Eric, was “passed around’’ the extended family during her long absences. In 1898, she was on an expedition to the US (where, bizarrely, she had a facelift) when she learned via telegram that Eric, nicknamed Puck, had died, aged 22. While the preferred family story was that he was killed in the Boer War, Morton-Evans says he perished in an African jail after being convicted of forgery.
The author writes bluntly of Eric’s death: “Ellis, who once said, ‘I have never let anything interfere with my work’, paid a high price for her unconventional, independent life. Puck had finally got his mother’s attention.’’
The painter’s grief did not extinguish her seemingly insatiable sense of adventure. She twice visited PNG during World War I and in 1917 – when she was about to turn 70 – she ventured alone into the Highlands – a territory, says the biography, “so densely forested and forbidding that even the local tribes had remained isolated from one another’’. During these forays, she would paint 45 of 52 known Bird of Paradise species, at great cost to her health.
She almost died of malaria while visiting the Highlands; it was not the first time she had contracted the disease.
She passed away in 1922, having failed to convince the federal government to buy her collected works at market price. She had more success in selling 125 drawings to the Queensland Museum in 1912 and eight years later she exhibited 1000 paintings in Sydney – then the biggest solo show held in Australia. In 1923, the commonwealth finally bought the Rowan collection for half the asking price, and it is now held by the NLA.
How should we remember this painter and explorer whose astonishing feats have largely faded from public consciousness? Morton-Evans, now working on a historical novel, says: “We should remember her as a woman absolutely outside of her time. She took great risks to do something for the benefit of Australia, and she left a great legacy.’’
They may be rarely exhibited, says the biographer, but Rowan’s paintings are “one of the Australian people’s most prized assets’’.
Ellis Rowan: A Life in Pictures by Christine Morton-Evans, NLA Publishing, $34.99 is out now.
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