Painter · American
Giverny painter
Louis Ritter
One of the 1887 group, dead at thirty-eight: the briefest passage of the whole colony.
- Dates1854 — 1892
- NationalityAmerican
- DisciplinePainter
- Place of birthPoughkeepsie, New York, United States
Biography
Louis Ritter was born at Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1854. He studied at the McMicken School of Design in Cincinnati in 1873 and 1874, worked as a lithographer in the mid-1870s, then entered the Royal Academy in Munich in 1878. He joined Frank Duveneck’s circle at Polling, Bavaria, then in Florence and Venice, from 1878 to 1880. He lived in Cincinnati from 1881 to 1883, in Boston from 1883 to 1885, and spent part of 1885 at Barbizon. Back in Boston from 1889, he painted landscapes there and taught at Wellesley College. He exhibited regularly at the St. Botolph Club and the Boston Water-Color Society. He died in Boston in 1892, aged thirty-eight.
Giverny
He was active at Giverny in 1887, the year the house opened as an inn — one of the very first Americans to come. The following year he left again for Florence, to be with Duveneck. His career stopped short in 1892: he knew the village only in its beginnings.
Principal works
Key points
- 1854Born — Poughkeepsie, New York, United States
- Giverny1887, season
- 1892Died
Sources
- 01Terra Foundation for American Art, “Impressionist Giverny: American Painters in France, 1885–1915”, exhibition texts
- 02Cincinnati Art Museum, works by Louis Ritter
- 03Hôtel Baudy guest register, “Registre pour inscrire les voyageurs”, Philadelphia Museum of Art; transcribed by Carol Lowrey in William H. Gerdts, Monet’s Giverny, Abbeville Press, 1993, pp. 222-227.
- 04Carol Lowrey, “Artists’ Biographies”, in William H. Gerdts, Monet’s Giverny: An Impressionist Colony, Abbeville Press, New York, 1993, pp. 214-221.
