Rafael Ritz

Rafael Ritz (Maria Joseph Franz Anton Raphael Ritz; Brig, 17 January 1829 – Sion, 11 April 1894) was a Swiss genre and landscape painter associated with the Düsseldorf School. He was also known by the nicknames Alpen-Raphael and Walliser-Raphael. His work bridges German academic painting and the depiction of popular Alpine life.

The son of a church and portrait painter, Lorenz Justin Ritz, he first learned to draw from his father and, from 1851 to 1853, studied with his uncle Heinrich Kaiser. His father disapproved of his interest in landscape, and science was suggested as an alternative. Encouraged by the Nazarene painters Paul and Theodor von Deschwanden, he enrolled at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he studied from 1853 to 1856. After 1860 he worked in the studio of Rudolf Jordan, who introduced him to genre painting with folk life motifs.

In 1862 he achieved his first major success when Kaiser Wilhelm I bought one of his works at an exhibition in Brussels. This allowed him to open his own studio in Düsseldorf, but he stayed only a year, as his father's failing health called him home to help with several altarpieces. After a brief return to Düsseldorf, he fell ill and settled permanently in Sion.

He then combined painting with writing numerous works on biology, geology, archaeology and folklore, many published in the yearbooks of the Schweizer Alpen-Club, of which he was a member. In 1874, at a spa in Albisbrunn, he met and married Caroline Nördlinger, with whom he had five children, among them the mathematician and physicist Walther Ritz. He later helped establish the Swiss National Museum and belonged to several groups devoted to historic preservation. An unspecified illness began to trouble him in 1889 and led to his death in 1894.