Louis Ritman

Louis Ritman was born in 1889 in Kamianets-Podilskyi, then part of the Russian Empire and now in Ukraine. His family immigrated to the United States around the turn of the century and settled in Chicago, where he worked in a sign shop while taking evening drawing classes at Hull House under Enella Benedict. He entered the evening life drawing class at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on October 2, 1905, and by 1908 was also attending daytime classes there under John Henry Vanderpoel. From June 1906 he studied evenings at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, where scholarships in 1906 and 1908 supported his training, and in the autumn of 1908 a further scholarship took him briefly to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.

Encouraged by fellow Chicago artist Lawton Parker, Ritman traveled to Paris in 1909 and was accepted into the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Two of his paintings were included in the Paris Salon of 1911. He spent summers working in Giverny, painting women in walled gardens in a high keyed, decorative Impressionist style. In 1914 he mounted his professional debut, a solo exhibition of Giverny paintings at Lawton Parker's Pearson Street studio in Chicago, which the Art Institute of Chicago restaged in February and March 1915. The following years brought exhibitions in New York, including at the Folsom Galleries, and by 1923 he was represented by Milch Galleries, which organized a show of fifteen of his paintings at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester and a one man exhibition in the Art Institute of Chicago's gallery of honor that December. A 1924 traveling version of that exhibition went to Des Moines, where the local museum purchased two of his paintings for its permanent collection. Milch Galleries showed his French paintings again in 1929.

Around 1929 to 1930 Ritman returned to the United States and joined the faculty of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, teaching figure and portrait painting for decades. He was elected a full member of the National Academy of Design in 1950. Illness led him to retire from teaching around 1958. Louis Ritman died on November 25, 1963, in Winona, Minnesota, at the age of seventy four.

Ritman's documented recognition rests mainly on institutional markers rather than on preserved contemporary press notices in the sources available for this profile: two of his paintings were juried into the Paris Salon of 1911, he exhibited for decades in the annual shows of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the National Academy of Design, and he was elected a full member of the National Academy of Design in 1950. Specific published critical commentary from his lifetime has not been independently verified for this profile and is not quoted here.

The most fully documented Ritman auction result identified in current research is USD 68,750, achieved at Heritage Auctions on December 3, 2020; the specific work sold is not identified in the source record. Market aggregators such as MutualArt report an even higher realized price, up to USD 665,000, for an unspecified painting, but the title, auction house, and exact date of that sale are not available in verifiable public sources, so it is not presented here as a confirmed record. Market trackers report his cumulative auction turnover at roughly USD 6.91 million across 27 years of recorded sales, spread across auction houses including Heritage Auctions, Rago, Freeman's, and Christie's. Results vary widely by size, subject, and condition: Rago sold Country Home for USD 2,560 in 2026. There is no documented current gallery or estate representation for Ritman; his work moves through auction houses and dealers, including Madron Gallery in Chicago, rather than through a single representing gallery.

Ritman has no catalogue raisonne, so provenance and exhibition history carry extra weight in confirming a work. His auction results range enormously, from a few thousand dollars for minor or later works to a fully documented USD 68,750 for a signed studio work, with higher, less-verified prices reported by market aggregators; any single sale should be read in the context of the specific work rather than as a market average. With no current gallery or estate representation, most transactions happen at auction or through specialist dealers, and his historical museum presence, including at the Des Moines Art Center and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, is a better guide to his standing than any one recent price.