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About Louis Ritter
Louis Ritter (1852-1896), born in Cincinnati, Ohio, first studied at the McMicken School of Design, then traveled to Munich, where he became one of the "Duveneck Boys." Ritter won a silver medal in drawing at the Munich Academy in 1879. In 1883 he settled in Boston to open his own studio; he probably met Willard Metcalf there. The following year he was back in Europe — this time France, where he and others "discovered" the town of Giverny during the summer of 1887. In Giverny, the celebrated hub of rural impressionism, Ritter abandoned the dark Munich style for a high-key impressionist palette. Ritter returned to Boston by 1890 and died at the untimely age of thirty-seven.
Woodland Interior is a delightfully simple composition with two major areas dividing a vertical format. The blacks below and the outlining of the trees manifest Ritter’s Munich training, while the greens are characteristic of the first generation of American painters in Giverny. The wispy treatment of the trees in the distance is very similar to Willows and Stream, Giverny, dated 1887, in the Terra Museum. Here is Ritter’s fascination with the object properties of organic surfaces; on the other hand, his treatment of the surfaces of rock, bark, and foliage is spontaneous and probably executed en plein air. |
Paintings by Louis Ritter
| Woodland Interior |
| oil on canvas, 14 x 8 ½ inches |
| signed: lower right |
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