William Ritter

William François Marie Ritter (31 May 1867 – 19 March 1955) was a Swiss novelist, critic and painter. Life Ritter was born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland on 31 May 1867, the son of Guillaume (also known as Wilhelm) Ritter (1835–1912), a French architect and hydraulic engineer from Soultz responsible for enabling a supply of fresh water to La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1887, and Josephine Ducrést, a Swiss woman from Berne. Ritter went to the Jesuit school in Dole, followed by the Collège latin in Neuchâtel from 1881, then in 1885 he enrolled in the Academy of Neuchâtel. As a young man Ritter was a devotee of Richard Wagner, and he made contact with French Decadent circles in Paris in his early twenties. After he graduated from the Academy he travelled extensively in Europe, first in the west – Paris, Vienna, Munich – then in the east (Czechoslovakia, Poland, Montenegro, Romania and Slovakia), gathering material for his novels. The near East provided Ritter with a taste of the exoticism, comparable to the Istanbul described by Pierre Loti, that was a particular fascination to figures within the Decadent movement in Paris, particularly the aesthete Robert de Montesquiou and Sâr Péladan. Ritter went to Prague in 1888 to learn German, then studied the history of art and music at the University of Vienna for a term, taking a course in harmony from Anton Bruckner. In 1889, his friend the French architect Léon Bachelin invited him to Bucharest, the first of a ten-year-long series of repeated trips that Ritter undertook to the east and the Balkans. The next year Ritter went to Transylvania with Nicolae Grigorescu, the painter. Tours in Albania on horseback with his friend Marcel Montandon in 1893 and a traverse of the Carpathians in 1898 by foot followed.