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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 February 2016
Ellis Rowan was Australia's most celebrated flower painter of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An emancipated woman far ahead of her time, she turned what her fellow Australian artists deemed a ‘genteel’ female pastime of flower painting into an adventurous and profitable career which took her all over the world. In a career spanning fifty years and ending with her death in 1922, she produced the phenomenal number of more than 3000 paintings, and succeeded in placing many of these in public collections. Rowan exhibited her work as far afield as London and New York and achieved acclaim at intercolonial and international exhibitions of art and industry (with the award of ten gold, fifteen silver and four bronze medals). Also a skilled writer and publicist, she recounted her travels in the popular press and in a book entitled A Flower-Hunter in Queensland and New Zealand, published in 1898. This paper focuses on the artist's work in Queensland, a favourite hunting ground, and on her association with the tropics which was an essential part of her mystique.
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2 The artist's work and travels in Queensland are studied more fully in Judith McKay, Ellis Rowan: A Flower-Hunter in Queensland (Brisbane: Queensland Museum, 1990).Google Scholar
3 About the time of her Australian visit, Marianne North donated her collection of paintings to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, together with funds to establish a fine gallery to house the collection.Google Scholar
4 Ellis Rowan to Queensland Premier Digby Denham, 6 December 1911, QSA, PRE/A, 1926/5028.Google Scholar
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