Faithfully Thought Out and Patiently Evolved: The Work of M. Louise Stowell and Harvey Ellis

Inspired by a cache of paintings and drawings acquired by the Memorial Art Gallery in 2016, Faithfully Thought Out and Patiently Evolved: The Work of M. Louise Stowell and Harvey Ellis brings new scholarship and fresh insight to introduce and situate the work of Rochester artist M. Louise Stowell and to reevaluate the artistic career of her friend and collaborator Harvey Ellis, focusing on the creative years they spent in Rochester at the turn of the twentieth century. In their heyday, Stowell and Ellis were renowned locally, nationally, and even internationally; however, Stowell’s name has been all but lost to scholarship, while Ellis’s name is associated more with Arts and Crafts furniture. Their drawings and watercolors—accomplished, ambitious, playful—demonstrate their synthesis of styles to create a shared vocabulary of technique and subject matter. Readers will come away with an appreciation of Stowell’s beautiful but little-seen body of work, her and Ellis’s collaborative artistic process, and an insight into the lives of working artists in Rochester in this era. The majority of the images in the book—many previously unpublished—are drawn from a group of 267 pieces purchased by MAG from the Strong National Museum of Play.

Kerry Schauber has been the research assistant at the Memorial Art Gallery since 2007. She holds a master’s degree in museum studies from Syracuse University. She was one of the authors of Memorial Art Gallery: 100 Years (2013), a contributing author to American Paintings at Harvard, vol. 2 (2008), and the coeditor of Sargent at Harvard (2000).

Lauren Tagliaferro is an art historian and curator who has been with the Memorial Art Gallery since 2018. She has graduate degrees from Syracuse University in art history and museum studies, and previously she was the registrar and assistant curator of the Sue Ann Genet Costume Collection at Syracuse University. She is the coauthor of 500 Patterns, published by Laurence King Publishing.