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.

[1][2][3][4][5][6][7] 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.

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.

[1][7][10] 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[3][4] and, while still in her teens, she began selling paintings, watercolors, and drawings to help support herself and her mother.

[11] In 1920 she won a scholarship to study at the Art Students League with the painter, Maurice Sterne, and sculptor, Leo Lentelli.

With Ruellan's mother, the pair returned to the United States in 1929 and settled in Shady, a village near Woodstock, New York.

Drawn with ink and wash on paper, it shows an African-American man carrying a heavy bag of coal on his back.

[15] She made the sketch while on a trip to Charleston, South Carolina, a place that, she said, was like a "whole new world" compared to New York and Paris where she had spent her youth.

[2][11][16] 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 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 their destination in hope that it would produce the sort of down-to-earth subjects that they sought.

[7] 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.

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 that 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.

[9][21] Showing a sandlot ball game near a gas storage tank and some low-income housing, it depicts players and spectators enjoying weekend downtime.

The painting fulfills Ruellan's intention to make works that are both well executed in a technical sense and also have emotional content.

[23] Created during the early stages of the U.S. participation in World War II, they conformed, broadly, to the we-can-do-it attitude fostered by the government and widely accepted within the country.

Ruellan prepared sketches on-site, as was her usual practice, and painted the mural in her studio retaining much of the freshness of the scene she had drawn.

[10] Spring in Georgia shows ordinary people in a rural setting: a woman and a girl tilling a flower garden, a mother with a young boy and infant, and a man with a team of mules.

Both in Paris and New York she made a habit of making circus sketches that she later developed into paintings, gouache, and prints to which American Artists Group purchased reproduction rights.

Called Thanksgiving Dinner, it appeared in 1945 accompanied by text naming it "one of a series of typical American scenes painted by America's foremost artists.

"[31] During World War II and the post-war years, Ruellan's style evolved to become darker and her work began to convey greater tension than before and to show surrealistic tendencies.

In both works the figures are moving from left to right, glancing downward and in both one sees the same diagonal and vertical lines of force.

At about that time she began to do sumi ink wash painting which proved to be a useful tool in merging representational fragments into an overall abstract approach.

[36] Ruellan and Taylor had determined to support themselves via their art and Lucette agreed to take on the management of their household so as to give them more time for their work.

Ruellan provided income through sale of artworks and Taylor did the same while also taking temporary jobs teaching college-level art courses.

Ruellan and Taylor were active participants within the artists' colony at Woodstock and she continued to produce art well into her eighties.