Louis Ritman (l889-l963)

Louis Ritman, an important American Impressionist, was born in Kamenets-Podolski, Russia, one of six sons born to a fabric designing father.  In l903 or l904, the family immigrated to the United States, settling in Chicago, where Ritman would eventually spend the last thirty-three years of his productive career.

After an early apprenticeship with a sign painting company, the artist enrolled in the Chicago Academy of Fine Art and, later, the Art Institute of Chicago, where he studied under Wellington Reynolds and John H. Vanderpoel.  Both instructors had trained at the Académie Julian in Paris and taught Ritman the tradition of European academic painting.

By l909, after a few months of instruction under William Merritt Chase in New York, the artist was in Paris to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts.  He was almost immediately accepted at the Paris Salon and given recognition by the Parisian author and critic, Thiebault-Sisson.  The subject of women shown in interior settings in these early paintings became a lasting statement for the artist.

Around l9ll, Ritman became an adherent of French Impressionism and rented a house in Giverny to be near Claude Monet and the Americans, Frederick Frieseke and Theodore Butler.  While in Giverny, Ritman sent canvases to the major annual exhibitions in America.  He was given a one-man show at the Art Institute of Chicago upon his brief return in l9l5, the same year he won the prestigious Silver Medal at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.

Ritman returned to Paris in l9l6, maintaining studios in both Paris and Giverny.  He began to add landscape subjects to his oeuvre and his style became increasingly fluid and broad in treatment as the French period progressed.

After nearly twenty years of unceasing productivity in Paris and Giverny, l929 marked the end of Ritman's French sojourn, although he would make many return visits during the remainder of his career.  He became an instructor at the Art Institute of Chicago in l930 and continued in that capacity for thirty years, during which time he received an impressive list of awards from the school: the Frank Prize (l932), the Brewer Prize (l939), the Martin B. Kahn Prize (l94l), to name a few.

A reviewer for the Chicago Art Institute Newsletter in l923 dubbed Ritman a "painter's painter, a master of the nuances of texture, an exquisite weaver of patterns, a man to whom pigment seems a natural medium.  His skill is unostentatious.  There is no striving after difficult passages.  They are tender and charming in sentiment and sensitive in execution."¹

Louis Ritman is represented in the Art Institute of Chicago; the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio; the Dayton Art Institute, Ohio; the Des Moines Art Center, Iowa; the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana; the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; the National Academy of Design, New York; the Philadelphia Art Museum; the Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona; the Rutgers University Gallery of Art, New Brunswick, New Jersey; and in many other public and private collections.

 

LB

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