York. While in Paris she met and fell in love with the American artist John Taylor. With Ruellan's mother, the pair returned to the United States in 1929 and settled in Shady, a village near Woodstock, New York. Mature style In the 1930s Ruellan developed a style which was social-realist with modernist and abstract elements. Her sympathy for her subjects and her ability to convey a warmth in them is similar to Edward Hopper's or Howard Cook's. See, for example, her undated drawing, Coal Delivery, which appears to come from this period. Drawn with ink and wash on paper, it shows an African-American man carrying a heavy bag of coal on his back. He is leaning forward as he places his right foot down and begins to raise the left one. He holds the coal bag with his right hand and leaves his left arm hanging free. The sketch suggests a patient endurance. The composition gives contrasts of diagonal—from left foot to cap—and vertical—the right leg and left arm, the whole showing both the pull of gravity and the energy of forward motion. In work such as this, Ruellan was seen to present social criticism with artistic frankness and little covering up of social facts, but also with empathy and awareness of the value of each person as a specific individual and not simply a generic "type". One of her best-known works, Crap Game of 1936, is more stylized than other compositions of the same period. As the title suggests, it shows a group of men playing craps. The industrial structures in the background provides what amounts to a stage on which the actions of the game take place. Ruellan normally worked surreptitiously, hiding her sketchbook in a newspaper, or sketching from the window of a car with the sketchbook in her lap. In doing this she insured a high degree of spontaneity in her work, but on this occasion the formality of the composition tempers the immediacy which her work usually shows. She made the sketch while on a trip to Charleston, South Carolina, a place which, she said, was like a "whole new world" compared to New York and Paris where she had spent her youth. She had been able to spend a month in Charleston because, despite the stock market crash and subsequent depression, Ruellan and Taylor were able to support themselves through art. The Weyhe Gallery