page_title: Ellis Rowan
section_title: Queensland Museum Collection
hierarchical_section_title: Ellis Rowan / Queensland Museum Collection
caption_attribution_description: English: 374 moths of New Guinea, in 11 columns, belonging to a wide variety of families , water colour with bodycolour on grey-green paper, 56.2 x 38.1 cm
context_page_description: Marian Ellis Rowan, known as Ellis Rowan, was a well-known Australian artist and botanical illustrator. She also did a series of illustrations on birds, butterflies and insects.
context_section_description: The Queensland Museums collection of 125 botanical paintings by Ellis Rowan has been in accessible to the public for almost half a century. By 1912, her collection was taken from the old Town Hall to the Queensland Museum after Rowan's victorious Exhibition.
  1.  Painting techniques
  Ellis Rowan painted most of her Queensland paintings indoor, she always worked into the night to drawn plants that she collected on her journey. On the other hand, Ellis was a rapid and direct painter who made her botanical paintings outdoor, which usually without the under-drawing of the pencil. She painted and traveled with her curiosity and personal interests, and she did not intend to be a serious botanical illustrator. She wrote of her Queensland Paintings:
  'The collection is painted with a view of showing the general public how the flowers grow with their surroundings—while they are all botanically correct you cannot in the one drawing make a picture of the flower and also show it scientifically drawn in sections which is quite a different study.'
  Ellis desired to make artistic compositions, which generally represented with bold close-up form. The colorful and vivid flora painted by her were not in the conventional way but placed in the varies native habitats, extending beyond the picture frame. It is said that her composition was influenced by the Thornton's Temple of Flora. Ellis sometimes added insects and even snakes to her artworks, like some of Thornton's artists, in order to achieve the dramatic effect.
  Claiming herself a self-taught painter, Ellis combined traditional watercolor techniques with opaque paints that she used to illustrate detail. She produced multiple copies of her paintings, and this non-professional and peculiar practice resulted in the difficulty of classifying the quantity of her output.
  2.  Plants
  For today's botanists, Ellis Rowan's painting has limited scientific research value because they are lacking the critical details that is necessary for the botanical illustrations. However, these flora drawings are accurate and clear enough to help people identify most of the plants she drew. Although Ellis confessed that she knew very little about plants, she maintained her passion and love to discovering the botanical world, dried many specimens as her collections.
  In the early year of her career, there was the trend that depicting the flower or fruit as an isolated part or branch, but her later career showed a change which was inclined to put plants in their own environment rather than in a studio-like space. Ellis created her botanical world more than paint every detail of her observation. There are some ‘new species’ plants created by Ellis, which often added one part of a plant to another, the most surprisingly, the arrangement of these different types plants presented a pleasing combination.
  There is another reason why Ellis’ paintings are not strong enough to be called the scientific illustration. It seems that Ellis had her own taste when she choosing the object, which resulted in the limitation of botanical species in her painting. She preferred colorful and showy species rather than many small-flowered herbaceous species, for example, waterlilies were her most favorite flowers, and there was no depicting of the large and significant sunflower family in her artworks.
  3.  Animals
  In spite of the spectacular botanical paintings, Ellis Rowan is also good at depicting animals and insects. The series about New Guinea bird and butterfly drawings are her major exploration into animal paintings. One-third of Ellis’ paintings which collected in the Queensland Museum were illustrated plenty of species of animal, such as beetles, butterflies, snakes and dragonflies. These insects or animals in Ellis’ works probably added later after the plants, because most of Ellis paintings finished indoor and the flower was often picked by herself or given to her by the local people. it has been questioned that whether the representation of these real species was accurate in their context. It is probably that Ellis combined plants a
caption: 374 moths of New Guinea, in 11 columns, belonging to a wide variety of families, water colour with bodycolour on grey-green paper, 56.2 x 38.1 cm   1918
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