in New York had given Ruellan a means of selling her work and Taylor took temporary jobs as art teacher at several universities. By the mid-1930s they had enough money to permit some travel and selected Charleston as destination in hope that it would produce the sort of down-to-earth subjects which they sought. The choice proved to be a good one as one of the paintings which resulted from that visit—Market Place—was the first of hers to be collected by a major museum. The Metropolitan Museum purchased it in 1940. During these years, Ruellan said her practice was to prepare a sketch in the field, develop the sketch into an intermediate form, usually gouache on paper, then create the finished product in oil on canvas. She worked on more than one painting at a time, moving on when she felt she was losing a sense of freshness in her work. When working in oils she thought out composition, balance, movement, and the tension of colors and patterns while retaining as much as possible the informality that was present in the original drawing. In 1941, Ruellan traveled to Savannah with her husband and her mother in order to spend several weeks observing and sketching. The painting she called Savannah dates from this period. Although Savannah is a city, there is no urban bustle and the painting has an almost pastoral appeal. The few figures shown are unhurried. The viewer sees what is clearly a real place at a specific moment of time, but is also aware of an emotionally evocative content: warehouses which are shut up, a man slumped in a doorway. Those who are not burdened by the necessity of manual labor (children, a white man with a cane, loiterers on the dock) contrast with one who is, an African-American pushing a handcart of lumber up the ramp. A second painting from the trip to Savannah, Savannah Landscape, The City Market, is similar to the harbor view. The light is warm and bright and the colors are warm and muted. The tone is placid and there's a suggestion of timeless continuity, yet the scene is clearly a specific moment in time. Once again there is a distinction between those who perform manual labor, shown at right, and those who do not, including a man in military uniform. A third painting from the trip to Savannah, The Wind-Up, was shown at