William Frederic Ritschel (1864-1949) was an 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 in Munich before emigrating to New York City in 1895. In 1911, he settled in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California and began painting the Monterey Peninsula. He died in Carmel in 1949. I have a great affinity for Ritschel and his work. For one thing, we we were both members of the Carmel Art Association and both spent a long number of years painting the Big Sur coastline, and so I am fully aware of all the problems he faced painting in the fog. In particular I understand his struggle to capture the incredibly beautiful shimmering iridescent light effect of sunlight in fog bouncing of waves. I tried for many years to capture this effect, and only after about ten years did I even come anywhere close to capturing the true effect. Ritschel spent much more time than me painting exactly the same scene, and more than any other painter I know, mastered the technique of luminescence. Ritschel had a tremendous ability to create music in his work, with extremely strong compositions and notan structures. At the same time he had almost perfect illusion, in particular his ability to accurately capture hue changes on a form, on both rocks and waves, iridescence on water, superb drawing skills, and in capturing the itness of natural forms of trees, water and rocks. All these characteristics made Ritschel's work stand out in quality over all the Northern Californian Impressionists, only being equaled by some of Armin Hansen's work.
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