Louis Ritman

(1889–1963)

Louis Ritman was born in Russia in 1889 and immigrated to the United States with his family around 1900. They settled in Chicago, where he almost immediately began studying art, and he worked as an illustrator beginning in 1903. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1905 to 1906 and at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts from 1906 to 1908, where he met Lawton Parker, the Impressionist who would eventually support and influence Ritman’s art. In 1910 Ritman studied in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts with Adolphe Déchenaud and at the Académie Julian with Jean-Paul Laurens and Tony Robert-Fleury. He exhibited his work at the Paris Salon and met Frederick Frieseke and Richard Miller.

He first visited Giverny, the home of Claude Monet and the site of an American Impressionist art colony, in 1911. While his Salon pictures had exhibited the conservative academic style that he had mastered at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Ritman began to adopt the intimate scenes favored by the Giverny circle of American artists, and he embraced their Impressionist aesthetic at Giverny in the summer of 1912. He rapidly developed his own style, in which he synthesized his extensive training in figure painting with his love of color and his interest in capturing light effects and atmosphere.

By 1916 Ritman was maintaining a studio at Giverny in the summer and one in Paris during the winter, all the while building his reputation by selling his work and garnering prizes and one-man exhibitions in Europe and in the United States. 

Ritman remained a resident of France until 1930, when he returned to the United States for good. He taught figure painting at the Art Institute of Chicago for thirty years.