Andree Ruellan, 101; U.S. Artist Inspired by Ashcan School

Andree Ruellan, 101, an American-born artist who began her career with a one-woman show in Paris at age 20 and last year celebrated her 100th birthday with a retrospective exhibition that traveled to several U.S. cities, died July 15 at a rest home in Kingston, N.Y.

She died of natural causes, according to friend Donald Keyes.

Inspired by the realistic style of artist Robert Henri and other members of the American Ashcan school in the early 1900s, Ruellan became best known for paintings of everyday life and for her impressionist brushwork.

During several trips to the Southeast starting in the Depression era, she painted ordinary people in everyday scenes: dice game players, dockworkers, Mardi Gras revelers. For one series of paintings, she depicted the daily lives of performers in a small circus.

Born in New York City, the daughter of French immigrant parents, Ruellan began studying art as a teenager in 1920 at the Art Students League in her hometown. After several years, she moved to Paris with her mother and continued to study and paint.

When Ruellan returned to the U.S. in 1928, she exhibited her paintings and drawings in New York City galleries and was later included in leading museum exhibitions around the country. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, among other museums.

Her last major exhibition, “Andree Ruellan’s 100th Birthday,” opened at the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens in March 2005.