1. Ellis Walter Ruley was an American folk artist and laborer.
22 Facts About Ellis Ruley
1. 2.
Ellis Ruley began painting in the 1930s at his home in Norwich, Connecticut, using house paint on cardboard and Masonite.
3.
Ellis Ruley worked almost his entire adult life in the construction trades, and had one daughter from his first marriage.
4.
Ellis Ruley was born on December 3,1882, to Joshua Ruley and Eudora Robinson.
5.
Joshua Ruley and Robinson had four sons and two daughters, of which Ellis Ruley was the oldest.
6.
Joshua Ellis Ruley married Eudora Robinson, who was born in Kingston, Rhode Island.
7.
One account describes Joshua Ellis Ruley as a runaway slave who was born in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1847 before escaping North at the end of the Civil War.
8.
Ellis Ruley worked in construction and the remains of stone walls he built can still be found on his old homestead.
9.
Ellis Ruley's first marriage was to Ida Bee, who died shortly after their daughter Marion was born in 1912.
10.
Ellis Ruley married a second time in 1933, to Wilhelmina Fox.
11.
In 1933, using part of the $8,500 he received in compensation for a work related truck accident, Ellis Ruley purchased 20 Hammond Avenue and began repairing the existing hundred-year-old house.
12.
Ellis Ruley renovated the property and installed gardens where he raised his own food.
13.
Ellis Ruley participated in the annual outdoor art exhibit, "Art in the Open", sponsored by the Norwich Art School, where he would sell his paintings for $15 each.
14.
Ellis Ruley's work has been described by Glenn Palmedo-Smith as "otherworldly", as though the images were "captured from dreams".
15.
In Palmedo-Smith's opinion, Ellis Ruley's work captures complex narratives with simple imagery.
16.
Ellis Ruley was found dead on the morning of January 17,1959, on Hammond Avenue "about 200 feet from his house".
17.
The Town Medical Examiner's opinion was that Ellis Ruley "died from exposure, although he lost considerable blood from a gash on the head".
18.
The Norwich Police Department learned that Ellis Ruley had been at a restaurant in Norwich the previous evening, where he had been drinking.
19.
Ellis Ruley was thought to be walking to or from his house.
20.
Stones in the wall were spattered with blood and it appeared that Ellis Ruley then staggered or stumbled in a circle and down a grade, back onto the Hammond road extension where he collapsed.
21.
Ellis Ruley concluded that we cannot determine how Ruley actually fell on the night of his death.
22.
In 1984, Glenn Palmedo-Smith found Ellis Ruley's painting Adam and Eve while at the antique market in Brimfield, Massachusetts.