Ruth Light Braun

Beautiful Portrait of Venice by Ruth Light Braun

20th Century

Painter Ruth Light Braun was born into a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York, USA in 1906. After graduating from high school with honor's in art, she enrolled at the Cooper Union Art College for Women in New York, where she took classes in painting and costume design. She worked as a freelance illustrator and her work was published in several books and magazines including the New Yorker. She also studied with the German-born painter Winhold Reiss, who had established his own school of art in New York in 1916, inspired by his portraits of American ethnic communities, which she afterwards made the major focus of her own work. She frequently drew her subjects against backdrops that reflected their daily lives including subway stations, department stores and the Lower East Side neighborhood's that were home to many Jewish immigrants.