The botanical genius of artists Rosa Fiveash and Ellis Rowan

Lovers of Australian flowers and botanical painting won’t want to miss these watercolours by Rosa Fiveash and Ellis Rowan at David Roche Gallery in Adelaide.

Ellis Rowan: Golden wattle; Nature revealed: Rosa Fiveash and Ellis Rowan David Roche Gallery, Adelaide, to 24 May

Ellis Rowan (1848-1922) and Rosa Fiveash (1854-1938) were near contemporaries, one in Victoria and the other in South Australia, and the leading botanical painters of their day. Their work is of great interest to lovers of Australian flowers and of botanical painting, but their presentation side by side in this exhibition is also an opportunity to appreciate the difference between their styles and sensibilities, and ultimately their approach to the genre of illustration itself.

Ellis Rowan, whose full maiden name was Marian Ellis Ryan, was the older of the two, came from a wealthy and distinguished colonial family, and was born in Melbourne in what is now the state of Victoria but was then still a part of the colony of New South Wales (fortuitously, the former Port Phillip District of NSW officially became a separate colony in 1850, just before it was immensely enriched by the gold rush).

She was by her own account self-taught, but already in 1873 won a bronze medal for a set of wildflower paintings exhibited at the Intercolonial Exhibition in Melbourne. According to the biographical sketch included in the exhibition catalogue, this was the same year she married Captain Frederic Charles Rowan (1844-92), who had fought in the Maori wars; they moved to New Zealand but in 1877 returned to Australia where her husband took up a business career.

Ellis Rowan had one son, Eric, known as Puck (1875-97), who sadly died young in Africa during the Second Boer War.

It was apparently also in 1873 that she met Ferdinand von Mueller (1825-96), the government botanist in Victoria, one of a number of remarkable German scientists and scholars who dominated the intellectual scene in Melbourne in the second half of the 19th century – a fact that seems subsequently to have been largely forgotten, no doubt especially after the Great War, although my friend the art historian Christopher Heathcote pointed out to me a couple of years ago that anti-German sentiment began to grow from the time of the nation’s unification under Prussian hegemony in 1871.

Mueller was responsible for identifying, naming and classifying as many as 4000 different plants in Victoria and Australia more generally. He was also friendly with Rowan’s father and, according to the catalogue, had advised him on the design of his new garden at Mount Macedon. Mueller and Rowan developed a close professional relationship, and until his death in 1896 he would identify the plants she had painted. Rowan was indeed, as we shall see, more strictly a flower painter than a botanical illustrator.

She was certainly an indefatigable worker, and after her husband’s premature death at the age of 47 in 1892, she embarked on ambitious travels around the world, both in search of new subjects – flowers, insects and birds that were often subsequently classified by Mueller – and in the promotion of her work.

Ellis Rowan: Left screen.

Ellis Rowan: Right screen.

These travels included a couple of years in England where she met Queen Victoria and had works bought by many distinguished people, including Lord Leighton. She worked in the United States, illustrating three books by the younger botanist Alice Lounsberry (1873-1949), and then returned to Australia in 1904 to continue her quest, according to the Australian Dictionary of Biography, “to find and record every species of wildflower on the continent”. In 1920 she held the “largest-ever solo exhibition by any artist in Australia”, with 1000 paintings shown at Anthony Hordern’s gallery in Sydney.

Rosa Fiveash was born a few years after Ellis Rowan, also into a prosperous, if less patrician family; her father was a business manager who had previously run a successful copper mine. When Rosa was five they moved into a handsome house in North Adelaide called The Gables, where she was to live with her sister until her death in 1938. Unlike Ellis Rowan, she never married, had no children and only twice travelled outside Australia; she was also, and again unlike Rowan, formally trained as an illustrator.

Rosa had expressed interest in painting as a child, and had taken lessons from a bird painting specialist. After her father’s death in 1872, she worked as a governess to supplement the household income. In 1881 she enrolled in the Adelaide School of Design, with a view to gaining professional qualifications as a teacher. As early as 1882 her talent was recognised when she was offered the commission to illustrate specimens for the publication Forest Flora of South Australia; she worked on this project from 1882-90, and was responsible for 32 of the 45 images published, although she had apparently prepared many more, which remained unpublished when the series was abandoned for lack of funds.

Meanwhile in 1888 she completed her Art Teacher’s Certificate in Adelaide; the diploma was accredited three years later by the National Art Training School at South Kensington in London, which was a few years later renamed The Royal College of Art. In the 1890s she executed many natural history illustrations for the South Australian Museum, from a new species of blind marsupial mole – drawn from a dead specimen – to living creatures such as a thorny devil.

She was also interested in learning new techniques and media, and studied floral painting on china in Melbourne before returning to teach it in Adelaide. For a few years this became a fashionable practice, but for some reason the fashion declined after 1896 and her class at the School of Design was terminated.

Rosa Fiveash: Tiger orchid.

Rosa Fiveash: Metallic sun orchid.

In 1900, Rosa Fiveash and her sister, Lily, finally set off on a trip to Europe about which it would be interesting to know more; they must have gone to London and presumably Paris, but they certainly spent time in Italy, for she gave a talk about Italy to the South Australian Society of Arts after her return in 1902. Just before their departure, the two had visited Lady Tennyson, wife of the governor of South Australia, Lord Hallam Tennyson, who was the son of the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson and governor of South Australia from 1899-1902 before becoming second governor-general of the Commonwealth of Australia from 1903-04.

Lady Tennyson described the visit in a letter to her mother quoted in the catalogue. The “two Miss Fiveashes” are described as “well read & kind little old maids” but the portfolio of drawings they showed her were “the most lovely collection of Australian wild flowers”. The work clearly impressed the governor too, for a couple of weeks later and with the financial assistance of wealthy colonist Robert Barr Smith, he purchased the entire collection, which was later donated to the Art Gallery of South Australia.

In 1908, Fiveash made another important connection, this time with Dr Richard Sanders Rogers (1861-1942), a distinguished physician and world expert on Australian orchids, “describing over 80 Australian species, three from New Zealand, 30 from New Guinea and three new genera, one being from New Zealand” (ADB). From this time until the end of her life, their collaboration lasted for three decades and resulted in what is clearly, as we can see in the exhibition, some of her best and most compelling work.

Both of these women painted flowers beautifully, but the differences between them can be best understood through their approaches to genre. Rowan’s paintings are clearly not technical botanical illustration, in which specimens are carefully drawn on the page rather than in real space, usually including roots and accompanied by details such as flowers and seed pods or nuts or either defining features of the species.

Rowan never presents her flowers in this way; she prefers to represent them in their natural setting as living plants. This means they are also painted in natural light and atmosphere, instead of laid out as crisply lit specimens on a page. A consequence of this, in turn, is that there is less contrast between figure and ground, a generally more impressionistic sense of light, and usually a lighter and more pastel palette. Generically speaking, Rowan is drawn towards still life and especially landscape, rather than to botanical illustration, and there are quite often glimpses of landscape in the background of the flowers that occupy the foreground of her compositions.

Ellis Rowan:Quandong.

Ellis Rowan: Blue pincushion.

Fiveash, in contrast, even though there are one or two images in which she too includes a background landscape, is overwhelmingly and clearly committed to the genre of botanical illustration. Her specimens are set out on a page rather than in a simulation of real space, and they are accompanied by the other details already mentioned that help to define and identify the species. As a result her images have a graphic clarity and crispness that cannot be achieved when representing flowers in natural light and atmosphere.

This may make it sound as though Fiveash’s work is rather dry and clinical compared to that of Rowan, and indeed Rowan’s more optical and at the same time affective approach to her subjects – as though expressly evoking the beauty of the flowers she depicts – may appeal to many viewers more than Fiveash’s dispassionate and objective vision. And yet flowers are such remarkable phenomena, and so full of their own life, that an approach that is ostensibly non-affective may even allow their presence to manifest itself more convincingly.

This is perhaps particularly the case with the orchid series that occupies the latter part of the exhibition, as of Fiveash’s oeuvre, and is the section of the exhibition that is most absorbing. Orchids are remarkable flowers in many ways: most of them do not need soil to grow in, but are epiphytes, growing on other plants or in improbable places such as the surface of rocks; their roots prefer bark or moss to earth.

Rosa Fiveash: Great sun orchid.

Even their name is unusual. It comes from the Greek word for testicle, and the reason for this is immediately apparent when we look at Fiveash’s exquisite drawings: for most of them end in a pair of roundish tubers of unmistakeable form. The name “orchis” seems to have been given to the genus by Theophrastus, the great ancient botanist and pupil of Aristotle, around the end of the 4th century BC, although the formal naming within the modern system of genus and species belongs to Carl Linnaeus, who devised the binomial classification system in the mid-18th century (Species plantarum, 1753).

The Latin scientific name, orchidaceae, was shortened to the English word “orchid” in the middle of the 19th century.

In any case, as we admire these vivid and quietly intense drawings, each so different but so distinctly characterised, it is impossible not to ponder the strange and rather poignant case of the artist who made them, an ageing Victorian spinster who spent year after year lovingly drawing and painting precise scientific images of what was once called, in a long-obsolete Middle English term, the bollockwort.

Nature revealed: Rosa Fiveash and Ellis Rowan, David Roche Gallery, Adelaide, until May 24.