William Frederic Ritschel

The Sea 1 (Dolphins), oil on canvas painting by William Frederic Ritschel, c. 1928, Honolulu Museum of Art

William Frederic Ritschel (1864–1949) was a California impressionist painter who was born in Nuremberg, Germany on July 11, 1864. As a youth, he worked as a sailor and began sketching seascapes. He studied art under Karl Raupp (1837–1918) and Wilhelm von Kaulbach (1805–1874) at the Royal Academy of Munich before immigrating to New York City in 1895. In 1911, he settled in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California and began painting Monterey Peninsula. He died in Carmel in 1949.

The Arizona State University Art Museum (Tempe, Arizona), the Art Institute of Chicago, the Crocker Art Museum (Sacramento, California), the Davenport Museum of Art (Davenport, Iawa), Fisher Gallery (University of Southern California, Los Angeles), the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Irvine Museum (Irvine, California), the Monterey Museum of Art (Monterey, California), the Museum of Art at Brigham Young University (Provo, Utah), the Newark Museum (Newark, New Jersey), the Oakland Museum of California (Oakland, California), the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (Philadelphia), the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D. C.), Springville Museum of Art (Springville, Utah), and the University of Arizona Museum of Art (Tucson, Arizona) are among the public collections holding works by William Frederic Ritschel.

References

• Gerdts, William H., Art Across America: Two Centuries of Regional Painting, 1710-1920, New York, Abbeville Press, 1990.
• Oakland Art Gallery, Paintings by William Ritschel; Paintings & Sculpture by George Alois Laisner, Oakland, Calif.: Oakland Art Gallery, 1947.
• Papanikolas, Theresa and DeSoto Brown, Art Deco Hawai'i, Honolulu, Honolulu Museum of Art, 2014, ISBN 978-0-937426-89-0, p. 100