Louis Ritman was an American impressionist painter. He is best known for his female nudes, painted in a fashion similar to that of his friends Frederick Carl Frieseke

Frederick Carl Frieseke

Frederick Carl Frieseke was an American Impressionist painter who spent most of his life as an expatriate in France. An influential member of the Giverny art colony, his paintings often concentrated on various effects of dappled sunlight...

, Lawton Parker, and Richard E. Miller

Richard E. Miller

Richard E. Miller was a major American Impressionist painter and a member of the famous Giverny Colony of American Impressionists. Miller was primarily a figurative painter, known for his paintings of women posing languidly in interiors or outdoor settings. He is best described as a Decorative...

, all American artists who studied and lived in France.

Ritman was born in Russia and moved with his family to Chicago around 1900. He studied there and in Philadelphia, then moved to Paris at the advice of Parker to continue his studies. Ritman was a member of the second generation of American artists to work in Giverny

Giverny

Giverny is a commune in the Eure department in north-western France. It is best known as the location of Claude Monet's garden and home.-Location:Giverny sits on the "right bank" of the River Seine where the river Epte meets the Seine...

, where he first painted in 1911 and would continue to summer for the next twenty years. He and his contemporaries preferred the female nude as their subject, painted in dappled sunlight or in chromatic interiors. While his work bears strong similarities to Frieseke's, art historian William H. Gerdts

William H. Gerdts

William H. Gerdts is an American art historian and Professor Emeritus of Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center. Dr. Gerdts is the author of over twenty-five books on American art. An expert in American Impressionism, he is also well known for his work on nineteenth-century American still life...

 notes "an appealing wistfulness which is also quite distinct." The influence of Paul Cézanne

Paul Cézanne

Paul Cézanne was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th...

 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 end of his life.