Henry Ritter
Henry Ritter (24 May 1816, in Montreal – 21 December 1853, in Düsseldorf) was a German Canadian-born genre painter and illustrator; associated with the Düsseldorfer Malerschule. Biography 
His father was a Kingdom of Hanover officer, working with the British military, and his mother was English. At a young age, he went to live with an uncle in the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, where he served a commercial apprenticeship. After 1832, he received his first art lessons from Heinrich Jacob Aldenrath and Friedrich Carl Gröger. From 1836 to 1847, he was a student at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, in the classes of Karl Ferdinand Sohn and Friedrich Wilhelm Schadow. During his last seven years there, he was a member of the Master Class and had his own studio at the Akademie. Most influential, however, were the private lessons he took in 1837 and 1838 from Rudolf Jordan, who took him on trips to the North Sea, became his friend and taught him an ethnographic approach to painting. In 1842, he married a landowner's daughter from Bonn. Due to an ailment diagnosed as a "nervous fever", he moved to , near Siegburg. He returned to Düsseldorf in 1852 and died there the following year. His remaining works were preserved by Ferdinand Fagerlin, who married his sister-in-law and took over his studio. He was, perhaps, better known as an illustrator than a painter. From 1847, he was a regular contributor to the satirical . In 1849, he published Der Politische Struwwelpeter, a satire on the recent Revolution and the subject of German unification; based on the children's book, Struwwelpeter. From 1851 to 1853, he provided drawings for albums published by Wolfgang Müller von Königswinter. Among his notable book illustrations are those for a collection of works by Washington Irving. Selected works

References

External links 

 Illustrations for works by Washington Irving Online @ the University and State Library Düsseldorf
 ArtNet: More works by Ritter. 1816 births
1853 deaths
19th-century German painters
19th-century German male artists
German genre painters
German illustrators
Kunstakademie Düsseldorf alumni
Painters from Montreal
Pre-Confederation Quebec people
People from Hamburg
Düsseldorf school of painting
Canadian emigrants to Germany