Andr%C3%A9e Ruellan

Andre Ruellan was a prominent American artist. Born in Manhattan of French descent, she spent her youth there and in Paris and eventually made her home near the artist colony in Woodstock, New York. Her work is realist with modernist overtones and commonly depicts everyday scenes in American South and New York City. Her paintings, prints, watercolors, and drawings are known for their depiction ordinary people at work and play. They are held by many American museums and private collectors.

Ruellan was born in a brownstone near Washington Square Park in 1905 and was the only child of a couple who had immigrated from France a few years earlier. Her parents encouraged an early talent she showed for making realistic and fanciful drawings. Ardent Socialists, they believed the visual arts could help redress the dismissive attitude with which many Americans viewed people who were both less advantaged than themselves and, as they saw it, unpleasantly alien. When she was about eight, they arranged for an amateur artist, Ben Liber, to give her informal instruction and a year later her first published work appeared in the April issue of a socialist monthly, The Masses along with an editorial on religious hypocrisy by Max Eastman. Her drawing, called April, showed an angel scattering flowers above the head of a workman. That same year Ruellans artwork came to the attention of the Ashcan School painter Robert Henri. He arranged to include some of her watercolors and drawings in a sho

Source: Wikipedia