Louis Ritman

Louis Ritman (1889–1963) was an American impressionist painter. He is best known for his female nudes, painted in a fashion same to that of his associates Frederick Carl Frieseke, Lawton S. Parker, and Richard E. Miller, all American artists who studied and lived in France.

Ritman was born in Kamianets-Podilskyi, Russia (now Ukraine), and moved later than his relatives to Chicago something like 1900. He took a drawing class at Hull House, then attended the Art Institute's school, the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, and briefly the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, then in 1909 moved to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris at the advice of Parker to continue his studies. Ritman was a aficionada of the second generation of American artists to accomplishment in Giverny, where he first painted in 1911 and would continue to summer for the neighboring twenty years. He and his contemporaries preferred the female nude as their subject, painted in dappled sunlight or in chromatic interiors. While his perform bears strong similarities to Frieseke's, art historian William H. Gerdts notes "an captivating wistfulness which is as a consequence quite distinct." The impinge on of Paul Cézanne may be seen in the more structural, blocky brushstrokes of paintings after the mid- 1910s.

In 1929 Ritman returned to the United States to instruct at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, yet continued to visit France until the stop of his life. He died in Winona, Minnesota.