Louis Ritman -Woman Reading a Book in the Garden -1917 Oil Painting

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Louis Ritman -Woman reading a Book in the Garden -1917 Oil painting

American Impressionist Oil painting on board - Signed … Read more Louis Ritman -Woman reading a Book in the Garden -1917 Oil painting

American Impressionist Oil painting on board - Signed and dated 1917
Board size 18x22" Frame size 22x26"

Artist Biography
Louis Ritman (1889 - 1963) was active/lived in Illinois, Minnesota / France, Russian Federation.He is known for Figure-landscape, still life and genre painting.
By the end of his accomplished life in 1963, Louis Ritman had secured a comfortable spot amongst the most acclaimed American Impressionists painters. Ritman was famous for his bright, sunny landscapes and genre scenes of gentile feminine figures. Had it not been for one fateful night at a café in Paris, however, Ritman's career could have been significantly different.Born in Kaments-Podolsky, Russia in 1889, the Ritman family relocated to the U.S. in the early 1900's. Like many immigrant families, they ended up settling in Chicago, Illinois. It was in there as well as Philadelphia that Ritman received his earliest artistic training. By 1909, however, the romantic pull of Paris grabbed hold of Louis Ritman, and he joined countless other American ex-patriots who had traveled to France, including Richard E. Miller, Mary Cassatt and James Abbot McNeil Whistler. Louis studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and also at the Academie Julian where he became well versed in the academic methods of the time.Louis Ritman's artistic career took a turn one evening in 1911, when he made the acquaintance of fellow American painter Frederic Freiseke who invited Louis to paint with him at an artist's colony in Giverny. He accepted and was immediately inspired by the creative atmosphere present there. The artist's at Giverny were the pioneers of Impressionism as we know it today, and the atmosphere of experimentation that this small French village provided was essential to their success. It was in this environment that Louis Ritman stopped working as a student of the French Academic School and began working as an Impressionist avant-garde artist. Ritman continued to visit Giverny each summer until 1930. After that time, he took a full time position as an instructor at the Art Institute of Chicago. It is clear that the time he spent painting in Giverny made a substantial impact on his career as a fine artist. Paintings from this period are highly prized and collected. Apple Trees was completed on location in Giverny and is a stunning example of the style, composition and palette typically used by the artist's of this colony. The Impressionist's who worked there favored soft pastels, light-filled brushstrokes and quaint landscapes that captured the serenity of the quaint hamlet of Giverny. The blossoming branches of the apple tree orchard that grew outside the artists house in Giverny are also captured by fellow resident Theodore Robinson, in his painting Blossoms at Giverny. The importance of the gardens at Giverny in the minds of the artist's who painted them is certainly reinforced by the frequency with which they were painted by master Impressionist, Claude Monet. It is clear that without the creative risks taken at Giverny the paths of many artists, including Louis Ritman, may have been very different. Impressionism provided the building blocks for the divergent thinking that opened a path from realism to the pivotal modern art movements of the future. Therefore, Apple Blossoms should not just be seen as a tranquil and beautiful landscape, but also as a part of a movement that had far reaching effects on the course of art history that followed.

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