Richard Ellis, a marine life polymath who revealed the beauty and wonder of the ocean through paintings, books and museum installations, most notably a life-size blue whale at New York's American Museum of Natural History, died May 21 in Norwood. New Jersey He was 86 years old.
His daughter, Elizabeth Ellis, said the cause of his death at the nursing facility was a heart attack.
Mr. Ellis has no formal training in marine biology, conservation, drawing, or writing. But combining his artistic talent with his encyclopedic knowledge of marine life has made him invaluable to conservationists, educators, and those curious about marine life.
Ellen V. Futter is the former director of the Museum of Natural History, where Mr. Ellis was a researcher for many years. “Richard was an enthusiast and he absolutely loved the natural world, especially the ocean. “He wanted everyone to share his appreciation and joy of its beauty, but he also wanted them to feel the same sense of responsibility to protect it.”
Mr. Ellis spent most of his life traveling to exotic locales. There he sailed around and dived for giant squid, great white sharks and other fantastic and elusive deep-sea creatures.
“If people understood the life, importance, and habits of sharks, whales, manatees, and other creatures, they would have respect for them,” Ellis told the New York Times in 2012. ‘Wow, I didn’t know that’ or ‘Isn’t that cool! Look what an octopus can do!’”
His realistic whale paintings have been sold in art galleries and published in Audubon and National Wildlife magazines and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Best-selling author Simon Winchester's dozens of books on marine life, especially those on whales, sharks and tuna, have made him “Poet Laureate of the Marine World.”
Throughout his life, Mr. Ellis was never far from any major body of water. Growing up on the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens, he swam in the Atlantic Ocean almost every day, weather permitting. The blue water and what lurked beneath it were often washed into his daydreams.
“I sat in class and learned about the Revolutionary War, except I drew a swordfish,” he told the Long Island Weekly in 2015. “I didn’t think this would be the start of my career, but it did.”
In 1969, the American Museum of Natural History hired Mr. Ellis as an exhibition designer to help create a life-size blue whale to hang from the ceiling of the Hall of Ocean Life.
“I thought, ‘Okay, how hard can it be?’” Mr. Ellis told The Times. “There should be photos of all kinds.”
There wasn't. Mr. Ellis had to rely on drawings and photographs of dead animals, and the experience convinced him that the only way to accurately depict the wonders of the ocean was to swim among them.
In the 1980s, wearing scuba gear and protected by a steel cage, he was one of the first ocean explorers to swim with great white sharks. “I remember breathing incredibly fast because I was sure the sharks were going to break through the cage and kill me,” he told The Times.
After that fear subsided, Mr. Ellis was filled with wonder.
“You don’t belong here, but you do,” he said. “Then you realize how beautiful it really is and you spend the rest of your time looking at this animal or taking pictures of it and thinking, ‘I am so honored to see this animal in its natural habitat.’”
Richard Ellis was born April 2, 1938, in Belle Harbor, near Queens. His father Robert was a lawyer and also worked for the United Transformer Corporation. His mother, Sylvia (Levy) Ellis, was also a lawyer, but she did not practice law.
He spent most of his childhood swimming in the ocean.
“I have always been fascinated by the ocean and the creatures that live in it,” he told The Times. “But most of the time it was me who lived in it.”
After earning a degree in American Civilization from the University of Pennsylvania in 1959, he joined the Army. He was stationed in Honolulu and spent his off-hours surfing and swimming in the Pacific Ocean.
Mr. Ellis maintained a lifelong affiliation with the American Museum of Natural History, but made a living by painting, writing, and illustrating picture books. His achievements were tremendous.
“The Book of Whales” (1980), accompanied by his illustrations, tells the complex history of almost all whale species.
In “Monsters of the Sea” (1994), author and naturalist Janet Lembke wrote in a review for The Times that Mr. Ellis described “monsters sacred to legend: leviathans, polyps, humans—Elasmobranch (also known as sharks), all kinds of They eat sea snakes (including Nessie, the Loch Ness monster) and huge, stranded chunks of flesh called ‘blobs’ and ‘globsters’ for want of a more accurate name.”
“Tuna: A Love Story” (2008) tells the story of how a fish that can swim at 55 miles per hour became an overfished commodity.
Mr. Ellis wrote: “For biologists, tuna is the epitome of hydrodynamic excellence. They are fast, powerful, efficient, and have specializations that allow them to perform their tasks better than any other fish in the sea.”
To humans, it is tuna salad and sushi.
“What I do is I paint things I admire,” Mr. Ellis told the NPR program “Talk of the Nation” in 2008. “Others shoot them, some fish them. I draw them.”
Mr. Ellis married Anna Kneeland in 1963. They divorced in 1981.
In addition to his daughter, he is survived by his companion since 1989, Stephanie W. Guest; son Timo; Mr. Guest's children, Victoria, Vanessa, Fred and Andrew Guest; six grandchildren; and his brother David. He lived on the west side of Manhattan for many years.
Mr. Ellis appeared on the CNN program “Larry King Live” in 2001 after a shark bit an 8-year-old boy off a beach in Pensacola, Florida.
“Isn’t it dangerous to be hungry?” Mr. King asked him.
exactly.
“They’ve been around for about 300 million years,” Mr. Ellis said. “If there was anything moving in the water, the sharks could eat it.”
It's not the sharks' fault that people started swimming in the water.
“If it moves in the water and you’re a shark, you can eat it,” Mr. Ellis said.