[6] She was educated at Miss Murphy's private school in Melbourne, and in 1873 married Captain Charles Rowan,[7] who had fought in the New Zealand wars.

Rowan exhibited her work at the Palace of Fine Arts at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois.

It was while in America, travelling with Lounsberry, that Rowan received news that her son Eric had been killed in the Second Boer War.

[9][6] Other books by Rowan published in Australia were Bill Baillie, his Life and Adventures, The Queensland Flora, and Sketches in Black and White in New Zealand.

[13] The Queensland Museum's collection of 125 botanical paintings by Ellis Rowan has been in accessible to the public for almost half a century.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

They liked running their warm fingers over those long cold exquisite bodies.’[15] Ellis Rowan full of enthusiasm with her artistic creation, which enabled herself to observe the insect world and animal life.

Though the scientific value of Ellis’ botanical Paintings is limited, they are as the excellent record of history of some Queensland's flora drawn by an artist who was in search of the aesthetic expression and picturesque beauty.