Raphael Ritz, most famous scion of a family of artists in Valais, received first lessons from his father, the portrait and church painter Lorenz Justin Ritz. From 1853-1856 he studied landscape and genre painting at the then leading Düsseldorf Academy. In the summer of 1860 he opened his own studio there and quickly became a sought-after painter idyllic and at the same ethnographic precision geschilderter Swiss genre scenes.

Due to his regular family visits and study he remained closely linked to his home. In 1875, he settled with his wife in the final Wallis down and engaged in the sequence on different cultural levels for its local environment. For example, he was instrumental in establishing the archaeolog...