Andrée Ruellan

Who was Andrée Ruellan?

Andrée Ruellan was an American painter, known for her depictions of everyday scenes in New York and the American South.

Ruellan was born in New York City. She was a child prodigy who first exhibited her work at age 9, when the Ashcan School painter Robert Henri included her work in a group show in the East Village. At age 15, Ruellan's father was killed in an accident, and she began selling paintings to support herself and her mother.

During the Depression, she traveled to the South, and painted numerous works of African Americans going about their everyday lives. Her best-known painting from that period is Crap Game. She worked for the Section of Painting and Sculpture of the U.S. Treasury Department, executing at least one post office mural, in Emporia, Virginia.

Ruellan's works are included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum. In 2005, the Georgia Museum of Art organized a retrospective of her art in honor of her 100th birthday.

Ruellan married fellow painter John W. Taylor in 1929. They had no children. She lived in Shady, New York for many years before her death in Kingston, New York in 2006.