Louis Ritman

Provenance:
Signature Galleries, Chicago, Illinois.
R. H. Love Galleries, Chicago, Illinois.
Simone Goodman, Highland Park, Illinois, acquired directly from the above.
Private Collection, Highland Park, Illinois.
An Israeli cultural institution, 2017, gift of the above.

Exhibited:
Kenosha, Wisconsin, Carthage College, H. F. Johnson Gallery of Art, November 5 - 26, 1976.
Chicago, R. H. Love Galleries, Louis Ritman: The Giverny Years, September 18 - October 19, 1987.

Literature:
Richard H. Love, Louis Ritman: From Chicago to Giverny, Chicago, 1989, pp. 192-193; 257; 272, no. 16-1, illus.

Lot Essay:
In 1914, when Louis Ritman completed Girl with a Fan, he was already well acquainted with Giverny, the home of Claude Monet, and a preferred destination for American artists wishing to further their own Impressionist practice. The works executed during the summers spent at Giverny, roughly between 1911 and 1919, are viewed as Ritman’s most accomplished and representative of his aesthetic.

Girl with a Fan offers a masterful interplay of textural patterning and visual repetition, yielding a warm, peaceful and intimate portrait of a single female figure, Ritman’s signature subject. While the flowers in the vase mirror the design on the sitter’s fan and dress, the sunlight adds a consistent pattern that recalls the roundness of those floral arrangements, further echoed by the plump fruit set on the circular table. Girl with a Fan subtly combines the plein air style which helps capture dramatic sunlight with explicit domestic motifs, such as the fruit and floral elements typical of an interior genre scene or still life.