43

LOUIS RITMAN

American, 1889-1963

"Summer Day"

oil on canvas
signed lower left "L. Ritman"
39 1/2 x 39 1/2 in. (100.3 x 100.3 cm.), Frame: 45 3/4 x 45 3/4 x 2 1/2 in. (116.2 x 116.2 x 6.4 cm.)

  • Provenance: Ontario East Gallery, Chicago, Illinois; John and Dorothy Wall, Chicago, Illinois; Private Collection; Sotheby's, New York, New York, March 6, 2019, lot 44; Private Collection, New York
  • Notes:

    Louis Ritman was born in Kamenets-Podolsky in southwestern Russia in 1889, and immigrated with his family to Chicago at the turn of the 20th century. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. At the suggestion of fellow Chicagoan Lawton Parker, Ritman moved to Paris in 1909, where he studied at the Académie Julian and Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

    In 1911, he spent his first summer in Giverny, painting alongside Richard Emil Miller and Frederick Carl Frieseke, and by 1914, Ritman had his own studio and property there. For Ritman, as for other American expatriates, the rural village where Claude Monet had settled was an aesthetic Mecca; Ritman would summer in Giverny for the next twenty years. In 1929, Ritman returned to Chicago to teach at the School of the Art Institute, but he continued to visit France throughout his life.

    Ritman's preferred subject was the female figure, painted either in Giverny's lush gardens or in brightly colored interiors. According to William H. Gerdts:

    "Ritman's color and the nature of his settings are close to those of Frieseke, though his favored figural type is very much his own, and his interpretation … projects an appealing wistfulness which is also quite distinct. From the mid-1910s, some of Ritman's images are conceived in a structural manner, with the brushstrokes laid on in blocks of paint, and critics perceptively suggested the influence of Paul Cézanne here."

    In "Summer Day," Ritman places the two figures on a porch with a garden visible behind them. The Impressionist influence is evident in his use of dappled light, impasto, broken color, and the everyday leisurely theme.

    Ritman's works can be found in numerous museum collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.
  • Condition: in very good overall condition; unlined canvas; no restoration apparent under UV

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