WILLIAM LOUIS SONNTAG PAINTINGS FOR SALE & BIOGRAPHY

WILLIAM LOUIS SONNTAG

American, 1822 - 1900

BIOGRAPHY
"A grandson of Wilhelm Louis von Sonntag, who served with the French during the American Revolution, William Louis Sonntag was born in East Liberty (now part of Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania. About 1823 the family moved to Cincinnati. Sonntag's father, Charles, who initially tried to discourage his son's interest in art in favor of a more practical profession, apprenticed him at age eighteen to a carpenter. That apprenticeship, however, ended after only three days. Following a tour of the Wisconsin Territory, Sonntag was apprenticed to an architect but left after three months. His father then abandoned attempts to divert him from artistic pursuits.

"Nothing is known of Sonntag's training in art, but he was very likely self-taught. The title of his first exhibited work, Jupiter and Calisto (unlocated), shown in Cincinnati in 1841, suggests that he may have copied from prints or paintings. From 1842 to 1844 the Cincinnati city directories listed him as a clerk. About 1846, Sonntag was hired by the proprietor of the Western Museum in Cincinnati to 'paint the needed dioramas, to make thunder on the drums, to blow for the organist, light the lamps and to make himself generally useful' (Cosmopolitan Art Journal 3 [Dec. 1858], p. 27). This work apparently enabled him to open his own studio. The American Art-Union in New York acquired and exhibited landscapes by Sonntag in 1846, 1848, 1849, and 1850.

"In late 1846 or early 1847, the Reverend Elias Lyman Magoon, a Baptist minister, col-lector, and art patron, encouraged Sonntag to paint a series of four paintings, The Progress of Civilization, 1847 (unlocated). Based on William Cullen Bryant's poem "The Ages," it was probably inspired as well by Thomas Cole's The Course of Empire, 1836. The series brought Sonntag recognition and commissions. In 1847 he sold eight paintings to the newly founded Western Art Union in Cincinnati. By 1850 he had begun his only known panorama, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained (unlocated), which was completed by John C. Wolfe (active 1843-1859) when Sonntag became ill. The panorama was shown at Barnum's American Museum in New York in May 1851. The same year Sonntag painted scenery for Wood's Theatre in Cincinnati. When Frank Blackwell Mayer visited Cincinnati in 1851, he characterized Sonntag as the painter "most eminent in landscape" and described his work as "remarkably fine, distinct, characteristic & truthful" (With Pen and Pencil On the Frontier in 1851, ed. by B. Heilbron [1932], p. 44).

"In 1851 Sonntag married Mary Ann Cowdell. The following year he was commissioned by the director of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company to paint landscapes along its route between Baltimore and Cumberland. The Sonntags, it seems, used the excursion as a delayed honeymoon. The artist's grandson, William Sonntag Miles (1970), reported that "trains would drop them off at a site chosen to paint and another train would have orders to pick them up in the evening when the light was no longer suitable for painting.” Sonntag exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts for the first time in 1853. He then set off for Europe with his pupil John R. Tait (1834-1909) and Robert S. Duncanson. Sonntag spent eight months in Europe. Little is known of his itinerary, but there is some evidence that he visited London, Paris, and Italy. By January 1854 he had returned to New York, and six months later he was in Cincinnati. In 1855 he began exhibiting at the National Academy of Design in New York, where he was elected an associate member in 1860 and an academician in 1861. He went to Florence in 1855 with the intention of settling there, but within a year he returned to America and in 1857 was living in New York. He visited the Carolinas and West Virginia in 1860, made trips to Italy possibly in 1860 and again in 1861 and 1862, spent the summers in the White Mountains in New England in the 1860s and in Vermont during the 1870s. From the 1860s Sonntag became increasingly interested in watercolor painting and beginning in 1881 exhibited on a regular basis at the American Watercolor Society. In 1882 and 1883 he collaborated on several paintings with Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait. Sonntag's son William L. Sonntag, Jr. (1869-1898), who was also an artist, died two years before his father.

"Sonntag's early work reflects his debt to the Hudson River school painters. Later, like many other American artists of his generation, he came under the influence of the Barbizon school, and his painting style changed considerably. An extraordinarily prolific painter, he was sometimes criticized for the uniformity and size of his output. He specialized almost exclusively in landscape painting and was a gifted watercolorist.”

[Natalie Spassky, American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1985, Vol. II, pp. 162-3]

Museum Collections
Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA
Adirondack Museum, Blue Mountain Lake, NY
Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, OH
Arnot Art Museum, Elmira, NY
Ball State University, Muncie, IN
Berkshire Museum, Pittsfield, MA
Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL
Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY
Brooks Memorial Art Gallery, Memphis, TN
Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH
Carnegie Institute Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA
Chrysler Museum at Norfolk, Norfolk, VA
Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH
Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York, NY
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Cummer Gallery of Art, Jacksonville, FL
Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI
Evansville Museum of Arts and Science, Evansville, IN
Fruitlands Museums, Prospect Hill, Harvard, MA
Hackley Art Gallery, Muskegon, MI
Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA
Hopkins Center for the Arts, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH
Hunter Museum of Art, Chattanooga, TN
Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA
Lyman Allyn Museum, New London, CT
Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, NY
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Milwaukee Art Center, Milwaukee, WI
Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ
Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, MA
Nassau County Museum, Syossett, NY
National Academy of Design, New York, NY
National Gallery of Victoria, Victoria, Australia
New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT
New York Historical Society, New York, NY
Onondaga Historical Association, Syracuse, NY
Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME
Reading Public Museum and Art Gallery, Reading, PA
Rollins College, Winter Park, FL
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
J. B. Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY
Trinity College, Hartford, CT
Washington County Museum of Fine Arts, Baltimore, MD
William Benton Museum of Art, Storrs, CT
William Rockhill Nelson Gallery, Kansas City, MO

Mark Murray Fine Paintings is a New York gallery specializing in buying and selling 19th century and early 20th century artwork.

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