“Storm Lashed Coast” by William Ritschel

William Ritschel is well known for his marine and coast views of the Carmel area. His paintings still evoke a strong emotional response. Using impressionistic lighting effects to create scenes that varied from quiet moonlit shores to dramatic, violent ocean storms, he had a remarkable ability to convey a particular mood or atmosphere.

Ritschel was born in Nuremberg, Germany on July 11th, 1864 and worked as a sailor in his youth. He was inspired by the ocean and its changing moods and became fascinated by it as he drew and sketched. He studied at the Royal Academy in Munich, and became quite well known throughout Europe. Immigrating to New York City in 1895, he also enjoyed considerable success in the United States.

He was a member of the Salamagundi Club and the New York Watercolor Society. Like other followers of the Impressionist style, he explored the quality of light in each scene, using loose, clearly visible brushstrokes, that captured a feeling of movement and spontaneity. His attraction to the ocean, with its ever-changing moods and motions, seemed perfectly suited to California Impressionism.

In 1911, he came to Carmel, California, which was quickly becoming a thriving artists’ colony as painters began to arrive following the San Francisco earthquake. In 1912, he began to exhibit his California coastal scenes at venues on the East Coast and simultaneously displayed his works at the Art Gallery at the Del Monte Hotel in Monterey.

He built “Castel a Mare” in 1918, his castle-like home in the Carmel Highlands area, perched directly on the ocean’s edge. He was known as a flamboyant character, often dressing in a flowered sarong. In 1913, artist Armin Hansen moved to Carmel, and was eventually introduced to William Ritschel in 1918. He arranged for Hansen to show his works in a New York gallery and Armin Hansen eventually became one of the most prominent and celebrated early California artists who also focused on marine and coastal subjects.

Ritschel traveled around the world and painted the seas and coasts of various exotic locations including the South Seas, Asia, Capri, and Majorca. He died in his beloved “Castel a Mare” on March 11th, 1949. In October of 1949, Armin Hansen was the author of a moving tribute to the artist for his friend’s Memorial Exhibition which was held at the Carmel Art Association.

His travels worldwide clearly had a profound effect on him as he went on to become a painter of the sea. In 1911 he settled in Carmel. At this time, his paintings were exhibited nationally as well as in Europe. His fame as a marine painter led to a membership in the prestigious National Academy in 1914. In 1918 he began construction on an ocean view home and studio in the Carmel Highlands. This castle-like stone estate, called Castellammare, was to remain his home base for the rest of his life. He was known locally as an eccentric painter, who was often seen on the Carmel bluffs with brushes and canvases in hand studying the changing light and tides along the coast.

Ritschel exhibited internationally and on both coasts of America, and was elected to the National Academy in 1914. This was primarily on the acclaim generated by his brilliant views of the coasts, and his Plein Air Impressionist style put him in the forefront of the American movement, alongside his friend and contemporary Childe Hassam. Ritschel sought and successfully developed techniques that allowed him to portray the diverse moods and emotions of the sea. Rather diverse himself, he built a grand castle-like estate and studio and was often seen on the Californian Coast painting in an islanders sarong amongst the Cypress trees of Carmel. He died in Carmel in 1949.

„Storm Lashed Coast” is a classic example of Ritschel at his finest, capturing the power of the sea and its beauty. Many of his work are named „Storm Lashed Coast”. His impressionist style is the perfect vehicle to represent the movement, color and force of the sea on the rocks. There is nothing static about a rocky coast and a turbulent ocean, and Ritschel was a master at transferring this dynamic interaction to canvas. It is no wonder that Ritschel's marine paintings were well received in exhibitions worldwide. As with his plein air contemporaries such as William Wendt and Guy Rose, Ritschel was to become synonymous with promoting the majesty of California in the first quarter of the last century.

Ritschel's paintings are beautifully designed, with good notan structures and flattened values. He is a master of the technique of iridescence, which you see in his ocean scenes. He also handles warm/cool relationships very well.

One of the keys to capturing the iridescent light shimmering through the fog that is so characteristic of a coastline scene is representing the correct color relationships between the light and shade planes of the foam in the water. William Ritschel (1864-1949) was a master of painting that light with a high degree of both poetry and music, as I discovered when I painted part of the same California coastline where he worked for more than 30 years.

The colors on the foam are a warm yellow orange in the light planes and a blue gray in the shadow planes. Getting two accurate colors in a painting seems a simple thing to do, but only master painters can accomplish it. The skill is acquired only after a long period of working outdoors on color studies.

The key to getting these colors correct is to avoid making the shadow color either too gray (which would lose the form) or too saturated (which would make the scene too gaudy, as in many commercial marine paintings). This single color relationship accomplishes two things in a painting. First, it gives the foam a three-dimensional appearance. Second, it tells the viewer the precise color of the light falling on the foam and captures the true feeling of that light. Color relationships like these are key to giving this painting its poetry, its sense of place and time of day.

The structure of this painting is particularly interesting. It works both in two values, and in four. Ritschel accomplished that by dividing each value of the two-value notan structure into two more values, but making those values so close that he did not lose the original two-value structure.

The artist painted various marine and coastal views in order to capture the beauty of the sea, as the series named „Storm Lashed Coast”, „Morning Litany Carmel Highlights” and many more.

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By Cosmina M Oltean

(Art writer & PPG Gallery curator)