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Louis Ritter
1854–1892
BirthplaceCincinnati, Ohio, United States of America
Death placeBoston, Massachusetts, United States of America
BiographyLouis Ritter’s landscape paintings of scenes in Europe and on the New England coast demonstrate the influence of new trends in European art that were just beginning to infiltrate American painting in the 1870s and 1880s. Born in Cincinnati, he studied at the McMicken School of Design in 1873–74. In 1878 he went to Munich, Germany, like many of his fellow compatriots, to enroll in the prestigious Royal Academy of Munich, where he won a silver medal in drawing. Ritter studied with influential American painter and teacher Frank Duveneck, a native of the Cincinnati area. As a member of the “Duveneck Boys,” actually a mixed group of American art students, Ritter visited Florence, Italy, along with Theodore Wendel. Returning to Cincinnati around 1881, he organized an exhibition of work he and fellow students had done abroad. Discouraged by the show’s poor reception by local critics, in 1883 Ritter moved to Boston, where he shared a studio with Wendel.
Ritter began teaching in Boston and at nearby Wellesley College, and painted the scenery along the coast north of the city. He became friends with John Leslie Breck and may have met Willard L. Metcalf before traveling to France in 1886. The following year he showed a portrait in the prestigious Paris Salon exhibition. That summer, in the company of Metcalf, Wendel, Breck, and others, Ritter spent several months in Giverny, a rural village some ninety kilometers from Paris that soon would become an important artists’ colony. He shared a house in Giverny with Breck and Breck’s mother and brother for the summer. Ritter never fully embraced impressionism, with its bold use of distinct strokes of pure, bright color, to which many of his Giverny colleagues soon were converted. Ritter may have returned to France again in 1891, the year he was represented in the progressive Champs de Mars exhibition in Paris. He also exhibited in New York, Philadelphia, and his native Cincinnati, as well as in Boston. Ritter’s career was cut short at the age of thirty-seven. The catalogue for the extensive memorial exhibition at Boston’s St. Botolph Club held shortly after his death indicates that Ritter worked in watercolor and in pastel as well as oils, and that he made still lifes and portraits as well as landscapes.
Ritter began teaching in Boston and at nearby Wellesley College, and painted the scenery along the coast north of the city. He became friends with John Leslie Breck and may have met Willard L. Metcalf before traveling to France in 1886. The following year he showed a portrait in the prestigious Paris Salon exhibition. That summer, in the company of Metcalf, Wendel, Breck, and others, Ritter spent several months in Giverny, a rural village some ninety kilometers from Paris that soon would become an important artists’ colony. He shared a house in Giverny with Breck and Breck’s mother and brother for the summer. Ritter never fully embraced impressionism, with its bold use of distinct strokes of pure, bright color, to which many of his Giverny colleagues soon were converted. Ritter may have returned to France again in 1891, the year he was represented in the progressive Champs de Mars exhibition in Paris. He also exhibited in New York, Philadelphia, and his native Cincinnati, as well as in Boston. Ritter’s career was cut short at the age of thirty-seven. The catalogue for the extensive memorial exhibition at Boston’s St. Botolph Club held shortly after his death indicates that Ritter worked in watercolor and in pastel as well as oils, and that he made still lifes and portraits as well as landscapes.