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Andree Ruellan

Andree Ruellan, a noted painter of the 1930s and '40s whose complete body of work spans almost the entire 20th century, died on July 15, 2006 in Kingston, N.Y. She was 101 and lived for many years in Shady, N.Y., near Woodstock.

A child prodigy, Ms. Ruellan first exhibited her work at age 9. As a young woman, she was known for her sympathetic depictions of scenes from ordinary life, which she observed on the streets of New York and in her travels in the American South.

Ms. Ruellan's work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, both in New York, and elsewhere. Ms. Ruellan was born in Manhattan on April 6, 1905, to parents who had come from France. Her father, Andre, was an aviator and airplane mechanic.

She began drawing early. In 1914, when she was 9, the Ashcan School painter Robert Henri invited her to join a group show in the East Village.
In 1920 Ms. Ruellan's father was killed in an airfield accident, and she began selling her work to support herself and her mother, Lucette. The same year, she was awarded a scholarship to the Art Students League of New York, where she studied with the noted painter Maurice Sterne.

For much of the 1920s, she and her mother lived in Paris. There, she met John W. Taylor, a painter, whom she married in 1929. Soon afterward, the couple moved to Shady, where for decades they were part of Woodstock's lively artists' colony. Mr. Taylor died in 1983.

During the Depression, Ms. Ruellan and her husband made several trips to the South, which resulted in some of her most memorable work. Her paintings from the period are notable for their portrayals of ordinary African-Americans at work and at play.

In later years her work was more influenced by surrealism and abstract expressionism. But to the end of her career - she continued to draw well into her 80s - she remained a realist, committed to the idea that art should represent solid, flesh-and-blood humanity.

Biography courtesy of Roughton Galleries, www.antiquesandfineart.com/roughton

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