Ellis Rowan (1848–1922) was Australia's most celebrated flower painter of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An emancipated woman ahead of her time, she turned what her fellow Australian artists deemed a “genteel” female pastime of flower painting into an adventurous career that took her all over the world. In a career spanning fifty years 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 a book entitled A Flower-Hunter in Queensland and New Zealand, published in 1898.

North Queensland was one of Ellis Rowan’s favourite hunting-grounds. First visiting Queensland in 1887, she found the colourful tropical flowers “more beautiful than all”. She returned on several “flower-hunting” expeditions — in the winters of 1891, 1892, 1911, 1912 and 1913 — to make a systematic collection of the state’s flora. In 1912 she staged an exhibition of her Queensland paintings in Brisbane, from which the State Government purchased 125 paintings. These are now held by the Queensland Museum, the second largest collection of Rowan’s work in public hands.


Ellis Rowan spent he early married life in New Zealand, living from 1873 at Pukearuhe near New Plymouth, where her soldier husband was garrisoned. Cut off from her formerly life of "gaiety" she perfected her flower-painting technique at Pukearuhe before the Rowan's returned to Melbourne in 1877.

In November 1893, a year after her husband's sudden death from pneumonia, Ellis set off on a nostalgic tour of New Zealand. She spent the summer months in the North Island and autumn in the South Island, retreating in late May 1894 before the advance of winter. Her tour was not only nostaglic. From Decemeber 1893 to August 1894 she was publishing an illustrated diary of her travels in the popular Australian Weekly, The Town and Country Journal.

During her viists to Christchurch in March and April 1894, Ellis Rowan was greatly impressed by the flower-painting of the local artist Margaret Stoddart and encouraged her to exhibit in Melbourne later that year. Though Margaret Stoddart was soon to extend her work in other directions, the role that Ellis provided was crucial to her later career.

Judith McKay, Ellis Rowan: A Flower-Hunter in Queensland (Brisbane: Queensland Museum, 1990).