Andrée Ruellan (April 6, 1905 – July 15, 2006) was an American artist whose realist work has modernist overtones and commonly depicts everyday scenes in American South and New York City. 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 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. Early life and education 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 Ruellan's artwork came to the attention of the Ashcan School painter Robert Henri. He arranged to include some of her watercolors and drawings in a show at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery where he and George Bellows also showed. Over the next few years Ruellan suffered setbacks, first when she was injured in a fire and later when her father died in an accident at work and, while still in her teens, she began selling paintings, watercolors, and drawings to help support herself and her mother. In 1920 she won a scholarship to study at the Art Students League with the painter, Maurice Sterne, and sculptor, Leo Lentelli. Two years later she followed Sterne to Rome on another art scholarship and over the next five years she and her mother remained in Paris where she continued to work and study. During that time she obtained her first solo exhibition at the Sacre du Printemps Gallerie and in 1928 she was given her second one-woman show at the Weyhe Gallery in New