“Faithfully Thought Out”: The Artistic Collaborations of M. Louise Stowell and Harvey Ellis will be featured in MAG’s Lockhart Gallery June 28, 2024–January 12, 2025. Rochester artists M. Louise Stowell (1861–1930) and Harvey Ellis (1852–1904) were critically acclaimed around 1900, in the era of the American Arts and Crafts movement.
The Memorial Art Gallery’s collection of more than 250 works by Stowell and Ellis is inextricably bound with Rochester’s artistic history. Ellis was one of the founders of the Rochester Art Club in 1877, and he and Stowell together founded the Rochester Arts and Crafts Society, one of the first such organizations in the country. Inspired by MAG’s cache of paintings and drawings, most acquired in 2016, “Faithfully Thought Out” will feature the two artists’ processes during the creative years they spent in Rochester, showing works in varying stages of completion and demonstrating their collaboration and influence on each other. Stowell and Ellis often shared characteristic techniques and reference images as friends and colleagues. Visitors will see Stowell’s and Ellis’ unique artistic developments through extraordinary drawings and watercolors from MAG’s collection, supplemented by rarely seen materials from the artists’ papers held at the University of Rochester’s Department of Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation.
About Stowell and Ellis
Stowell and Ellis were friends and had neighboring studios on the seventh floor of the Powers Building in downtown Rochester, where Ellis and his brother had an architectural firm. Stowell, an instructor at the Mechanics Institute (the forerunner of the Rochester Institute of Technology), had a teacher’s drive to explain her philosophies and techniques to her students as well as through published articles. An article Stowell wrote in 1892 for the Educational Gazette, a periodical for teachers, advised, “Nothing should be careless in ornament or design, but should be faithfully thought out and patiently evolved.” While Ellis’s name is still recognized as an architect and designer, the watercolors, drawings, and paintings made in his later years are lesser known, and Stowell has vanished from scholarship.
The exhibition is sponsored by Charlotte and Raul Herrera in honor of Marie Via and the Memorial Art Gallery Endowed Fund Support: Dr. and Mrs. James H. Lockhart, Jr. Fund, Robert L. and Mary L. Sproull Fund, and Nancy R. Turner Fund for Temporary Exhibitions.