Ritz was born in the Swiss village of Niederwald, the youngest of 13 children in a poor peasant family.At the age of twelve he was sent as a boarder to the Jesuit college at Sion, and at fifteen, having shown only vaguely artistic leanings, was apprenticed as a wine waiter at a hotel in Brig.Dismissed after a year as an unsuitable candidate for the hotel trade, he returned briefly to the Jesuits as sacristan, then left to seek his fortune in Paris at the time of the 1867 Universal Exhibition.