Ellis W. Ruley

Ellis Ruley was an unschooled African-American artist who worked as a laborer near his home in Norwich, Connecticut. The son of a slave who had come north after the Civil War, he probably began painting in the 1930s when his settlement from a traffic accident allowed him to buy a secluded 3-acre property on a hilltop overlooking Norwich's harbor. He often painted while sitting on his bed with the afternoon sun on his easel, using house paint and poster board as medium and support. Many of his subjects -- harvests, waterfalls, lions, hunters, moose -- were taken from nature, but others, like King Going Up the Military Academy, appear to interpret images from popular magazines or from movies. Although Ruley sold some of his paintings at local art fairs, the unique qualities of his artistic imagination did not become known and appreciated until after his death.