Augustin Ritt

Augustin Christian Ritt (1765 to 1799) was a Russian miniature and portrait painter of German descent, born and later based in Saint Petersburg. He began his studies at the Imperial Academy of Arts there before traveling west for further training: in Antwerp under A. Queertmort from 1781 to 1785, and then in Paris at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, where he studied under Francois-Andre Vincent from 1786 to 1792.

He returned to Saint Petersburg in March 1792 and found rapid success, working as a court miniaturist to the Russian imperial family and painting Catherine the Great, Paul I, and Alexander I. In 1797, the Imperial Academy of Arts elected him academician. In 1799, he exhibited at the Salon de Paris. He died later that year in Saint Petersburg, at the age of 34; the exact date and cause of his death are not recorded in the available sources.

Ritt's standing rests mainly on his 1797 election as academician of the Imperial Academy of Arts and on assessments transmitted through specialist dealer scholarship, since little of the primary critical record from his lifetime survives in accessible form. Citing the miniature scholar Schidlof, the dealer Boris Wilnitsky Fine Arts places Ritt among the greatest miniaturists of his period, in the same class as Hall and Fueger, though this assessment comes from a single secondary source and has not been independently corroborated. Most current writing about him draws on museum attribution files, such as those at the Louvre and the Walters Art Museum, rather than on exhibition reviews from his own era.

No documented, cross-verified auction record for Augustin Ritt could be confirmed as of 2026-07-13. Dealer and auction-house references exist, including a Christie's lot page that cites a 2004 monograph on the artist, but available sources do not give a hammer price, currency, or sale date that could be verified across independent sources. As an 18th-century court miniaturist known mainly through museum and dealer scholarship, his market sits well outside the contemporary auction mainstream, and any single sale that does surface should be treated as an isolated data point rather than as evidence of a trend.

Ritt's work is scarce, unevenly documented, and untested at auction in any way that supports a reliable price benchmark. A catalogue raisonne (Komelova, 2004) is cited in the literature, but its contents are not widely accessible, so attribution in practice still depends heavily on museum provenance and on the scholarship of specialist dealers in Russian and European portrait miniatures. Anyone considering a work attributed to Ritt should verify inscriptions and provenance back to an identifiable 18th or 19th century collection, and compare it against the small number of museum-held examples at institutions such as the Louvre and the Walters Art Museum.