Harvey Ellis was an architect

Architect

An architect is a person trained in the planning, design and oversight of the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to offer or render services in connection with the design and construction of a building, or group of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the...

, perspective renderer and painter

Painting

Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...

. He worked in Rochester, New York

Rochester, New York

Rochester is a city in Monroe County, New York, south of Lake Ontario in the United States. Known as The World's Image Centre, it was also once known as The Flour City, and more recently as The Flower City...

; Utica, New York

Utica, New York

Utica is a city in and the county seat of Oneida County, New York, United States. The population was 62,235 at the 2010 census, an increase of 2.6% from the 2000 census....

; St. Paul, Minnesota; Minneapolis, Minnesota

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Minneapolis , nicknamed "City of Lakes" and the "Mill City," is the county seat of Hennepin County, the largest city in the U.S. state of Minnesota, and the 48th largest in the United States...

; St. Joseph, Missouri; St. Louis, Missouri

St. Louis, Missouri

St. Louis is an independent city on the eastern border of Missouri, United States. With a population of 319,294, it was the 58th-largest U.S. city at the 2010 U.S. Census. The Greater St...

 and Syracuse, New York

Syracuse, New York

Syracuse is a city in and the county seat of Onondaga County, New York, United States, the largest U.S. city with the name "Syracuse", and the fifth most populous city in the state. At the 2010 census, the city population was 145,170, and its metropolitan area had a population of 742,603...

.

Early Life in Rochester

Ellis was born in Rochester on October 17, 1852, the oldest of four sons of Dewitt and Eliza Haseltine Ellis. Childhood drawings suggest an unusual artistic aptitude. After public grade school and, for a while, a private high school academy in Rochester, Ellis entered the United States Military Academy at West Point

United States Military Academy

The United States Military Academy at West Point is a four-year coeducational federal service academy located at West Point, New York. The academy sits on scenic high ground overlooking the Hudson River, north of New York City...

 in 1871 but was among the first-year cadets discharged after seven months for academic insufficiency, in his case in French and mathematics.

During the next five years Ellis moved about between Albany, Rochester and New York. Documentation of this phase of his life is scarce. Family correspondence reveals that in New York in 1875 he supported himself by working part time as a draftsman in an engineering firm. He is thought to have studied painting with Edwin White

Edwin White

Edwin White was an American painter who studied in Paris, Rome, and Florence and later taught at the National Academy of Design, in New York....

 and architecture with Arthur Gilman

Arthur Gilman

Arthur Delevan Gilman was an American architect, designer of many Boston neighborhoods, and member of the American Institute of Architects. Gilman was a descendant of Edward Gilman Sr., one of the first settlers of Exeter, New Hampshire.Gilman was educated at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut...

; although plausible, these claims have resisted verification. It also has been said that he worked for Henry Hobson Richardson

Henry Hobson Richardson

Henry Hobson Richardson was a prominent American architect who designed buildings in Albany, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and other cities. The style he popularized is named for him: Richardsonian Romanesque...

; however, that is unlikely. Ellis made no such assertion, and there is no record of him in Richardson's archives.

In 1877, Ellis, by then an artist with maturing skills, returned to Rochester where he became one of the founders of the Rochester Art Club. In 1879 while simultaneously functioning as an artist, art teacher and active club member, he and his brother Charles established the architectural firm of H. and C. S. Ellis. Charles was adept at soliciting business, some of it through family connections, while Harvey did the designing. He was briefly assisted by a well paid non-family employee, E. Havelock Hand. During the next six years, the firm produced many Queen Anne residential, commercial and civic buildings. Most of them disappeared as Rochester expanded, and today little is known about them except their names and original locations. A popular but erroneous belief is that Harvey also designed the United States Court House and Post Office

Federal Building (Rochester, New York)

Federal Building, also known as the Old Post Office, is a historic office building located at Rochester in Monroe County, New York. It is a four story, Richardsonian Romanesque style structure with an inner court and tower. It was built between 1885 and 1889 of heavy brown sandstone with a metal...

 in Rochester, that serves as Rochester City Hall. Extensive documentation in the National Archives

National Archives and Records Administration

The National Archives and Records Administration is an independent agency of the United States government charged with preserving and documenting government and historical records and with increasing public access to those documents, which comprise the National Archives...

 reveals that this building, like other government structures throughout the country at this time, was designed in the Office of the Supervising Architect

Office of the Supervising Architect

The Office of the Supervising Architect was an agency of the United States Treasury Department that designed federal government buildings from 1852 to 1939....

 of the United States Treasury.

There are biographical gaps for parts of 1885 and 1886. Newspaper accounts of his testimony as a witness in a jury trial, in which Charles was the defendant, place Harvey still in Rochester in early 1885, but that autumn he submitted an entry for a competition for a monument for General Ulysses Grant from Utica, New York

Utica, New York

Utica is a city in and the county seat of Oneida County, New York, United States. The population was 62,235 at the 2010 census, an increase of 2.6% from the 2000 census....

. It won first prize and publication in the nationally circulated American Architect and Building News. Several plein air watercolor sketches, identified in his hand as sites in France and dated with just the year 1885, imply a European trip. Census records reveal that he married that year. Speculation leads to a question: could a trip to France in 1885 have been a wedding trip with his bride as well as a sketching trip for him? His competition design is often described as Richardsonian, but it likely also reflected his personal responses to certain medieval buildings that he could have seen in France.

Midwestern Years

The city directory for St. Paul, Minnesota, places him there by, at the latest, mid-1886, the first stop in what would become a seven-year midwestern odyssey. He first worked for Charles Mould, replacing Mould's departing chief draftsman, H. E. Hand, transposed initials notwithstanding presumably the same well paid draftsman who previously had worked for the Ellises in Rochester. Perhaps he was the link between Rochester and the Midwest. Ellis's work for Mould is unknown. Signed and dated perspective renderings place him later that year in the office of J. Walter Stevens, for whom, among other projects, he produced an entry for the Detroit Museum of Fine Arts competition.

Ellis has often been viewed as a midwestern journeyman draftsman, no different from others in the band of able but lowly paid draftsmen who moved in the Midwest from office to office, from city to city, wherever there was work, content to collect their pay at the end of the week. Decades later they were called journeymen draftsmen. Ellis did indeed move often during this phase of his life, but he was not just one of the journeymen draftsmen. By the time he arrived in St. Paul, he had become an acclaimed artist and a leading figure in the arts community of Rochester; for six years he had been a principal in a successful architectural firm in Rochester; and he had won a national architectural design competition. Each time he moved in the Midwest there was an important design competition in the offing in the city to which he migrated. Architectural firms seemingly sought his services, paid him significantly more than other employees; and with each move he traded up in terms of professional opportunity.

The designer is unknown. In 1887 Ellis began to work in Minneapolis as chief draftsman for Leroy Sunderland Buffington who then had the largest architectural office in the state. Possibly Buffington recruited him to produce the entry that year for the Minneapolis City Hall and Hennepin County Court House competition. For unknown reasons Ellis's design was never submitted. In 1887 and 1888 Ellis designed numerous houses, commercial buildings and miscellaneous projects for Buffington. Most were his versions of Richardsonian Romanesque forms, but there also were small, attractive simple frame structures. He often has been credited with the design of Buffington's well known twenty-eight story iron-frame skyscraper, but that project more likely preceded Ellis's arrival and was the work of someone else, not yet identified, among Buffington's staff of more than thirty employees. In 1888 or 1889 the Mabel Tainter Memorial Building

Mabel Tainter Memorial Building

The Mabel Tainter Center for the Arts, originally named the Mabel Tainter Memorial Building and also known as the Mabel Tainter Theater, is a historic landmark in Menomonie, Wisconsin, and is registered on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places....

 in Menomonie, Wisconsin

Menomonie, Wisconsin

Two other spellings of the name appear elsewhere, see Menomonee and Menominee. For the town, see Menomonie .Menomonie is a city in and the county seat of Dunn County in the western part of the U.S. state of Wisconsin. The city's population was 16,264 as of the 2010 census...

 was designed, in the style of Richardsonian Romanesque. Ellis is often credited with this design, but this is questioned by some sources, who claim instead that it was the work of Edgar Eugene Joralemon.http://chuckstoyland.com/eej/ellislevering/index.html In 1889 Ellis worked briefly for the then thriving partnership of G. W. and F. D. Orff. Richardsonianism lingers, but several designs for the Orffs also herald new, uniquely Ellisonian paths that will reappear in some of his forthcoming Missouri designs. (
why is a photograph of the Compton Tower b

For each of his designs, Ellis made a so-called show drawing, usually a technically dazzling pen-and-ink perspective rendering, which Buffington and other employers submitted to the weekly American Architect and Building News and, sometimes, the monthly Inland Architect. Since few of these designs were built, fewer still stand today, and many of Ellis's original renderings have disappeared, the published renderings provide a trail of his evolution as a designer. Because his beautiful renderings appeared in widely disseminated magazines, Ellis quickly became one of the most influential perspective renderers in the country, and both his architectural and drawing mannerisms were soon imitated by dozens of other architects and delineators. Some of their work was signed, some was not, and decades later some of it was mistakenly attributed to Ellis. The concept that Ellis deliberately shunned professional acclaim by producing anonymous or pseudonymous work allowed such attributions. Separating the work of other delineators from that of Ellis is facilitated by the sometimes overlooked fact that, with but very few exceptions, Ellis signed his renderings just as he signed his paintings. Connoisseurship also helps. Ellis was proud of his achievements and with his signature claimed his rightful place in the world of architecture and painting.
By mid-1889 Ellis had joined the firm of Eckel and Mann in St. Joseph, Missouri, as its most highly paid employee. He produced a few Richardsonian projects, but Chateauesque forms also soon appeared. His most important project was the Chateauesque design for the 1890 St. Louis City Hall competition, which won the first prize and the job for the firm. In early 1891 George Mann moved to St.Louis to oversee construction of the city hall, and he also established a solo practice there. Later that year, after a brief time back in Minneapolis, where he produced a Beaux-Arts library design for Buffington, Ellis joined Mann in St. Louis. Certain projects continued in the Chateauesque vein, but Beaux-Arts forms and details soon became more prevalent. His projects for the ephemeral firm of Randall, Ellis and Baker reverted to a Richardsonian mode, rather outdated by then.

Later Life in Rochester

As the economic Panic of 1893

Panic of 1893

The Panic of 1893 was a serious economic depression in the United States that began in 1893. Similar to the Panic of 1873, this panic was marked by the collapse of railroad overbuilding and shaky railroad financing which set off a series of bank failures...

 swiftly enveloped the country, architectural offices in Missouri and everywhere else were diminished or closed, and that year Ellis's midwestern sojourn ended. He returned to Rochester and the practice his brother had maintained that then became known as Charles S. Ellis and Harvey Ellis, Architects. Most of their commissions at this time apparently were similar to the kinds of modest projects that they had started with sixteen years earlier. Their names are known, but there is little visual information about them. Painting and graphic design, not architecture, became Ellis's main intellectual focus after he returned to Rochester. His technical skills enabled him to master different pictorial modes of the day: traditional generic illusionism, Tonalism, Japonism, the more abstract precepts of Arthur Wesley Dow

Arthur Wesley Dow

Arthur Wesley Dow was an American painter, printmaker, photographer, and influential arts educator....

 and, via Dow, the avant-garde art of Paul Gauguin

Paul Gauguin

Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a leading French Post-Impressionist artist. He was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, sculptor, print-maker, ceramist, and writer...

. In 1897 several of Ellis's architectural designs began to reflect English Arts and Crafts architectural trends, and that same year he was one of the founders of the Rochester Arts and Crafts Society, apparently the first such organization in the country. For the rest of his life he was immersed in the American Arts and Crafts movement.

Syracuse and The Craftsman

Ellis's path and that of Gustav Stickley

Gustav Stickley

Gustav Stickley was a manufacturer of furniture and the leading proselytizer for the American Arts and Crafts movement, an extension of the British Arts and Crafts movement.-Biography:...

, the de facto leader of the American movement, eventually crossed, for Ellis, the president of the society, was in charge of installing Stickley's famous large 1903 Arts and Crafts exhibition in its Rochester venue, the Mechanics Institute. Shortly after that Ellis moved to Syracuse, New York, to join the expanding architecture department of Stickley's United Crafts organization. A number of unsigned illustrations that appear in Stickley's Craftsman magazine during the last half of 1903 have sometimes been attributed to Ellis. However, just six complete architectural designs (five were signed and one was unsigned); two signed projects that reside more in the realm of interior decoration than architecture per se; and one architectural essay devoid of illustrations were actually his work. Two of his paintings also appeared as Craftsman frontispieces. Ellis depicted furniture in the interior perspectives and elevations of his Craftsman residential designs, just as he had done in other situations, years earlier for Buffington for example. His intention was to demonstrate total aesthetic harmony between architecture and appropriate furnishings. There has never been a suggestion, then or now, that he designed the furniture he depicted for Buffington; however, long after their publication, his Craftsman renderings began to be interpreted to mean that he designed the furniture as well as drew it. This idea overlooked the fact that Ellis had no experience as a furniture designer and had been hired to work in the architecture department. The lightly scaled furniture in most of his illustrations, which differed significantly from the massive items previously often seen in The Craftsman, reflected newer design trends that Stickley began to promote after his Arts and Crafts exhibition. It was more likely designed by employees in his furniture department, such as LaMont Warner, for example, who responded to items Stickley had collected for the exhibition.

In contrast to this explanation are the comments of appraiser John Solo on Antiques Roadshow

Antiques Roadshow

Antiques Roadshow is a British television show in which antiques appraisers travel to various regions of the United Kingdom to appraise antiques brought in by local people. It has been running since 1979...

 in 2011. Describing a sheet music cabinet, Solo said, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/roadshow/archive/200805A48.html. The view of Ellis as designing the "golden age" of Stickley furniture is widespread. During Ellis' tenure, Craftsman designs showed a "lighter note" than later "blunt, straightforward, and unadorned" pieces after his death. A signature feature of the Ellis period is the use of purely decorative inlays, which disappear afterwards. He also introduced curved lower edges to horizontal rails that visually lightened Stickley's earlier designs. This "light touch" has been described as the influence of both Voysey

Charles Voysey (architect)

Charles Francis Annesley Voysey was an English architect and furniture and textile designer. Voysey's early work was as a designer of wallpapers, fabrics and furnishings in a simple Arts and Crafts style, but he is renowned as the architect of a number of notable country houses...

 and Mackintosh

Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Charles Rennie Mackintosh was a Scottish architect, designer, watercolourist and artist. He was a designer in the Arts and Crafts movement and also the main representative of Art Nouveau in the United Kingdom. He had a considerable influence on European design...

.

His time with Stickley was brief, for just seven months after moving to Syracuse, Ellis died there on January 2, 1904, of heart disease at the age of fifty-two. A convert to Roman Catholicism, he was buried in an unmarked grave in St. Agnes Cemetery in Syracuse. In 1997 the Arts and Crafts Society of Central New York honored him with a simple, dignified granite marker for his grave bearing his name, a Latin cross and the word Architect.For details of Ellis's work at The Craftsman see Michels, Reconfiguring, 273-327, which considers his relationship with Gustav Stickley and his architectural projects for the magazine. It also raises questions about Ellis's alleged furniture designs.

Representative Selection of Work

Buildings marked "NRHP" are on the National Register of Historic Places

National Register of Historic Places

The National Register of Historic Places is the United States government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects deemed worthy of preservation...

:

Architectural Designs for H. and C S. Ellis

• Asakel Kendrick house, Rochester, 1879
• Henry Ellsworth house, Rochester, 1882
• Frank Smith house, Angelica, New York, 1883
• Lamberton house, Rochester, 1884 NRHP
• Grace Episcopal Church
  Grace Church (Scottsville, New York)
  Grace Church is a historic Episcopal church located at Scottsville in Monroe County, New York. The church was designed by noted Rochester architect Harvey Ellis and built in 1885. It is in the Latin cross form in the Richardsonian Romanesque style. It has a native fieldstone lower level with an...
  
  , Scottsville, New York
  Scottsville, New York
  Scottsville is a village in southwestern Monroe County, New York, United States, and is in the northeastern part of the Town of Wheatland. The population was 2,128 at the 2000 census. The village is named after an early settler, Isaac Scott...
  
  , 1885

Architectural Designs for J. Walter Stevens

• Stevens house, projects, 1886
• West Publishing Company, St. Paul, 1886
• Goodsell Observatory
  Goodsell Observatory
  Goodsell Observatory is a building on the campus of Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. It was constructed in 1887 and was, at the time, the largest observatory in the state of Minnesota. It was named for Charles Goodsell, who donated much of the land on which Carleton was founded...
  
  , Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota, 1886
• Detroit Museum of Fine Arts competition entry, project, 1887
• Germania Bank Building
  Germania Bank Building
  The Germania Bank Building is an 1889 Richardsonian Romanesque office tower in Saint Paul, Minnesota built of sandstone, designed by J. Walter Stevens and draftsman Harvey Ellis. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places....
  
  , St. Paul, 1889

Architectural Designs for Leroy S. Buffington

• S. C. Gale house, Minneapolis, 1887
• Pillsbury Hall and Nicholson Hall within the University of Minnesota Old Campus Historic District
  University of Minnesota Old Campus Historic District
  The University of Minnesota Old Campus Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, includes a number of buildings on the Minneapolis campus that date back to the oldest days of the university.-Eddy Hall, 1886:...
  
  , Minneapolis, 1887 NRHP
• F. B. Hart house, Minneapolis, 1887
• Dormitory, State Experimental Farm School, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, project, 1887
• Wilsten house, Lynchburg, West Virginia, project, 1888
• Minneapolis City Hall
  Minneapolis City Hall
  Minneapolis City Hall and Hennepin County Courthouse , designed by Long and Kees in 1888, is the main building used by the city government of Minneapolis, Minnesota as well as by Hennepin County, Minnesota...
  
   and Hennepin County Court House competition entry, late 1887 or early 1888
• Office buildings, projects, 1887
• Library, project, 1891

Architectural Designs for G. W. and F. D. Orff

• J. F. Collum house, project, 1889
• Henry James Tenement, project, 1889

Architectural Designs for Eckel and Mann

• S. M. Nave house, project, 1889
• J. W. McAlister house, St. Joseph, 1889
• A. J. B. Moss house, St. Joseph, 1889
• Burnes family mausoleum, project, 1889
• St. Louis City Hall competition entry, St. Louis, 1890

Architectural Designs for George Mann

• St. Louis Union Station competition entry, project, 1891
• St. Vincent's Hospital, St. Louis, Missouri, 1891 NRHP
• Mercantile Club, project, 1891
• Columbia club, project, 1891
• George Mann house, project, 1892
• Fout houses, project, 1892
• Entrance to Fout Place, project, 1892
• Entrances to Bell Place, project, 1893

Architectural Designs for Randall, Ellis and Baker

• Gatehouse for a park, project,1892
• Fraternal building, project, 1892

Architectural Designs for Charles S. and Harvey Ellis, Architects

• Louis J. Slimmer house, Clarkesville, Iowa, 1894
• Woodworth Building, Rochester, 1894
• James Cunningham, Sons and Company, factory addition, Rochester, 1899
• Joseph Cunningham house, library, project, 1900
• Plaster house, project, 1901,
• Pierre Purcell house, project, 1901

Architectural Designs for The Craftsman

• Craftsman house, project, 1903
• Adirondack camp, project, 1903
• Child's Bedroom, project, 1903
• Urban house, project, 1903
• Puss in Boots decoration for a child's bedroom, project, 1903
• Summer chapel, project, 1903
• House in "A Note of Color", project, 1903
• Bungalow, project, 1903

Pictorial Art: Paintings, Drawings and Graphic Designs

• Minstrel show musicians, pencil and crayon, about 1858
• Christ Church, Oxford, pencil drawing, signed March 12, 1869
• Interior of a Room at 'Congress Hall, watercolor, signed January 26, 1877
• Reading the Bible, Old Chelsea Church, London, A.D. 1270, oil, signed 1878
• Star in the East, oil, signed 1877
• Orpheus, pencil, 1884
• Sommerville Pier and Lighthouse, watercolor, signed 1884
• Pitching Hay, watercolor, signed 1884
• Harbor at Sunset. watercolor, signed 1894
• Cows in a Hazy Landscape, watercolor, signed 1894
• Untitled urban scene along a canal, watercolor, signed 1894
• Joan of Arc, watercolor and pastel, signed 1894
• Cover for the Rochester Union and Advertiser, watercolor, signed 1895
• The Old Mill, watercolor, signed 1896
• Burning Brush, watercolor, 1896
• Fishermen at the Canal Lock, watercolor and pastel, signed 1896
• Poster for the Third National Cycle Exhibition, watercolor, 1897
• Pallas Athena Leading the Ships of the Argonauts, watercolor, signed 1898
• The Hourglass, watercolor, signed 1898
• Silhouettes, watercolor, signed 1899
• Night Study of the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad Station, watercolor, signed 1899
• Evening, pastel, signed 1899
• Illustration for 'The Cricket Song',Scribner's Magazine, watercolor, signed 1899
• Angel Appearing to the Shepherds, watercolor, signed 1901
• The Temptation of Eve, watercolor, 1902
• To These Belong the World and the Future, watercolor, 1903

Images of two Ellis prints are available at the Rochester Institute of Technology's Art on Campus website.

Images of a drawing and a watercolor painting by Ellis are on the website of the University of Rochester's Memorial Art Gallery

• Charlotte-Coburg Ferry (1897)
• Burning Brush (1896)

Additional Resources

• Grove Dictionary of Art, New York: Grove's Dictionary, Inc., c. v. Ellis, Harvey

• Ellis (Harvey) Papers, (D252), Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Rush Rhees Library, University of Rochester. The Ellis family memorabilia are here, including a number of Ellis's earliest childhood drawings and surviving office records. The department's website provides an inventory of the contents. Because of factual errors, the biography of Ellis that accompanies the inventory is best used with caution. Documents pertaining to the United States Court House and Post Office of Rochester (now City Hall) are in the Textual Records, National Archives Records Administration (NARA), College Park, Maryland. The Register of Letters Sent Chiefly by the Supervising Architect and Engineer in Charge, 14.628-30, and 15.716-17, summarizes each communication sent by the supervising arhitect about the Rochester building. Press copy books provide copies of letters sent by the local superintendent, who initially was Charles Ellis. They are incomplete and hard to read. Letters, including those from Charles, are also in the Public Service, General Correspondence Received 1843-1910, Record Group 121, Boxes 919 and 920. Drawings are in the Public Building Collection, Cartographic and Architectural Research Room at NARA. All told there are hundreds of items at NARA pertaining to the Rochester building.

• Ellis Papers, Military Academy Registers Entry 238, United States Military Academy, West Point, docouments details of Ellis's experience there.

• Rochester Art Club Minutes, Local History Division, Central Library of Rochester and Monroe County includes the minutes in Ellis' handwriting.

• Leroy S. Buffington Papers, Northwest Architectural Archives, University of Minnesota
  University of Minnesota
  The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities is a public research university located in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, United States. It is the oldest and largest part of the University of Minnesota system and has the fourth-largest main campus student body in the United States, with 52,557...
  
   Libraries. The Ellis entry on the NWAA website provides an inventory of the contents. It is best used with caution because a number of the perspective renderings are misattributed, and the accompanying biography of Ellis contains factual errors.

• Harvey Ellis Drawings and Related Papers, Manuscript Notebooks 81, Research Center, Minnesota Historical Society. Its website contains an inventory of correspondence and a few drawings. Because of factual errors the accompanying biography is best used with caution.

• Edmond Eckel Papers, Albrecht-Kemp Museum, St. Joseph, Missouri, consist of uncatalogued correspondence and Eckel's payroll daybook. There are no perspective renderings by Ellis; they were destroyed in an office fire.

• One-paragraph posts about various topics pertaining to Ellis are available on the blog Facts About Harvey Ellis whose URL is http://www.harveyellisfacts.blogspot.com

• Eileen Manning Michels, A Developmental Study of the Drawings Published in 'American Architect and Building News' and in 'Inland Architect Through 1895, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1971, 94-122, discusses Ellis's perspective renderings in historical context and assesses their significance.

• American Architect and Building News, Boston: Osgood & Company, illustrations, 1885–93, passim.

• Inland Architect, Chicago: Inland Publishing Co., 1883–1893, illustrations, passim.

• The Craftsman, Eastwood, New York: United Crafts. 1901-04, illustrations, passim.

• The Strong Museum in Rochester has the largest collection of Ellis's paintings. They span his life from childhood until shortly before his death.

• The Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, has a small but choice collection of Ellis's paintings.