Biografie von William Louis I SONNTAG (1822-1900)

Birth place: East Liberty, Pittsburgh, PA

Death place: NYC

Addresses: Cincinnati, c.1842-55; Italy, 1855-56; NYC, 1857-1900

Profession: Landscape painter

Studied: believed to have been a pupil of G. Frankenstein at the Cincinnati Acad. FA, early 1840s; visited Europe in 1853 and Florence, Italy, 1855-56.

Exhibited: PAFA Ann., 1853-69, 1876-80, 1887-89; NAD, 1861-1900; Brooklyn AA, 1862-86, 1891; Phila. AC; AWCS; AIC; Boston AC; Omaha Expo, 1898.

Member: ANA, 1860; NA (1861-); AWCS; Artists Fund Soc.; Am. Art Union

Work: NMAA; CGA; Peabody Institute; Berkshire Mus.; Brooklyn Mus; Chrysler Mus., Norfolk, VA (Massanutten Mountain on the Shenandoah River); Fogg Mus.; Harvard Univ.; Vassar College Art Gallery; Cincinnati AM

Comments: One of the central figures of the Hudson River School. His early landscapes were made on painting excursions from Cincinnati into the Ohio River Valley, Kentucky, and West Virginia (1856 and 1859). He also collaborated with John C. Wolfe on a large panorama of Milton's Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. After his return from Europe in 1857 he settled in NYC, exhibited extensively, and became known for his romantic American and Italian landscapes. His painting The Blue Ridge from Near Luray" was engraved by R. Hinshelwood and published in the Ladies Repository, 1869. He was the father of William Louis Sonntag, Jr. (see entry).

Sources: G&W; WW98; Art Annual, II, obit.; CAB; Clement and Hutton; Cist, Cincinnati in 1851; Ohio BD 1853; Cowdrey, NAD; Cowdrey, AA & AAU; Rutledge, PA; Rutledge, MHS; Swan, BA; N.Y. Herald, May 5, 1851; Clark, Ohio Art and Artists, 78, repro.; Art in America (Oct. 1951), 104, repro.; Encyclopaedia of New Orleans Artists, 360; Campbell, New Hampshire Scenery, 154-157; 300 Years of American Art, vol. 1, 195; Cincinnati Painters of the Golden Age, 103-104 (w/illus.); Wright, Artists in Virgina Before 1900; Falk, Exh. Record Series.