Henry Ritter

Henry Ritter (Montreal, 1816 – Düsseldorf, 1853) was a genre painter and illustrator born in Canada and trained in Germany, associated with the Düsseldorf School. His father was a Hanoverian officer serving with the British military, and his mother was English. As a young man he lived with an uncle in Hamburg and worked as a commercial apprentice before turning to art.

From 1836 he studied at the Düsseldorf Academy, where he later held his own studio during his years in the Master Class. The private lessons he took from Rudolf Jordan in 1837 and 1838 proved the most formative: Jordan took him on trips to the North Sea and taught him an ethnographic approach to painting. He married in 1842 and withdrew to Seligenthal, near Siegburg, for a illness diagnosed as "nervous fever". He returned to Düsseldorf in 1852 and died there the following year. His surviving works passed to his brother-in-law Ferdinand Fagerlin, who took over his studio.

Ritter is remembered mainly as an illustrator. From 1847 he contributed to the satirical Düsseldorfer Monathefte, and in 1849 he published The Political Struwwelpeter, a satire on the recent revolution and German unification based on the children's book Struwwelpeter. From 1851 to 1853 he supplied drawings for albums by Wolfgang Müller von Königswinter, and his book illustrations for Washington Irving are among his best-known work. Paintings such as Middy's sermon (1853) show his interest in everyday scenes.