ellis rowan gouache

“Native Wildflowers” Watercolour and gouache c1890’s by Marian Ellis Rowan. Marian Ellis Rowan was born in Melbourne in 1848, dying at Macedon in 1922. Although she had no formal training as a painter, her grandfather, John Cotton was a natural history painter. From the 1880’s she travelled widely both overseas and within Australia, studying and painting flowers in their native habitat. She was in north WA with Lady Forrest in 1889 and by 1895 was in London where she exhibited at the Dowdeswell Galleries. She afterwards visited, in Germany, Baron Ferdinand von Mueller, who had catalogued a number of her wildflower studies. This period was followed by several years spent in America illustrating books on American flora by Alice Lounsberry whom she accompanied on expeditions to all parts of the country in search of material. After visiting the West Indies, she returned to Melbourne, c1905. Next she went to WA, where she painted wildflowers on the goldfields before setting out for New Guinea and the adjacent islands, where she spent two years and painted 45 of the 52 known Birds of Paradise. She contracted malaria in the interior and the locals, reputedly cannibals, carried her many miles to the coast. Biographers remember her as a woman of small and delicate stature but of boundless energy, courage and spirit.Her work is represented in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Queensland Art Gallery, amongst others. The work has been professionally conserved and framed measures: 41cm x 61cm.

AU$7,485