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A woman named Andrée Ruellan made this lithograph. She was an artist best known for showing ordinary people at work or play in New York City, Savannah, Charleston, and along the New England coast. Born in Manhattan, her parents were French and she spent a good part of her young life in France. That's where this picture, Half Past Two, comes from. She made it in the late 1920s.

I'm putting together a Wikipedia article on Ruellan. Her work seems entirely straight-forward. It's mostly representational. She had great technical skill and a good eye. She could, and did, make greeting cards and illustrations for magazines. But most of her work, and all the best of it, transcends illustration. In 1943 she told an interviewer, "What moves me most is that in spite of poverty and the constant struggle for existence, so much kindness and sturdy courage remain. Naturally I want to paint well-designed pictures, but I also wish to convey these warmer human emotions."

I'm reproducing this image under fair use provisions of U.S. copyright law.