The Dual Identity of a Genre Painter To understand Henry Ritter, one must look past the simple label of a German painter and recognize the friction between his Canadian origins and his German training. Born in Montreal in 1816, Ritter did not follow the commercial path his father, a Hanoverian officer, intended. Instead, he moved through Hamburg before settling into the rigorous academic structure of the Düsseldorfer Malerschule. This was not a mere education; it was an immersion into a specific way of seeing the world through narrative and ethnographic detail. His technical foundation was…