William Louis Sonntag
1822 - 1900
Birth-PlaceEast Liberty, PA
Death-PlaceNew York, NY
BiographyWilliam Louis Sonntag (1822-1900)William Sonntag was born in East Liberty, Pennsylvania, and raised in Cincinnati, where his parents relocated a year after his birth. Little is known about his early artistic training. He had decided to become an artist by his early teens, though his father tried to dissuade these ambitions by apprenticing him to a carpenter and, later, to an architect. Sandwiched between these two apprenticeships was a trip to Wisconsin territory. This extensive riverboat tour, which introduced the impressionable young man to the wonders of the American frontier, may have fueled, rather than extinguished, his desire to paint.
While throughout his early career Sonntag worked as a diorama scene painter and stagehand at the Western Museum, he quickly earned a reputation as Cincinnati's premier landscape painter. He first exhibited a painting in 1841 at the Society for the Promotion of Useful Knowledge in Cincinnati. About 1846 his work gained him the attention of the Reverend Elias Lyman Magoon, a Cincinnati art collector and Baptist minister who encouraged him to paint an epic allegorical series, “The Progress of Civilization” (whereabouts unknown), which likely bore more than a slight resemblance to Thomas Cole's celebrated paintings of the same theme. By the end of the decade Sonntag was exhibiting and selling paintings at both the American Art-Union in New York and the newly formed Western Art Union in Cincinnati. About 1850 he painted the panorama of “Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained” (destroyed), which was shown in New York in May 1851. In 1852 Sonntag was commissioned by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad to paint the scenery along its Maryland route; he and his wife of less than a year, Mary Ann Cowdell, used the excursion as a delayed honeymoon.
In 1853 Sonntag took an eight-month trip to Europe with John R. Tait, his student and studio mate, and Robert S. Duncanson, a fellow Cincinnati painter. While the group visited the art centers of London and Paris, Sonntag showed a fondness for Rome and the Italian countryside. Several years later he returned to Italy with his wife and painted a number of works based on Italian scenery. After this second trip, the Sonntags relocated to New York, where Sonntag established his studio.
Sonntag became known for his scenes of America's wilderness. To find his subjects he made regular summer sketching trips to Ohio, Kentucky, the Carolinas, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine. His characteristic works are idealized landscape panoramas executed in the detailed photographic style of the Hudson River School. In the early 1870s, however, his work began to betray the influence of the Barbizon style in its increasingly limited palette, looser brushwork, smaller scale, and more intimate scope.
Sonntag first exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1855 and was elected an associate and academician of that body in 1860 and 1861, respectively. A member of the Artist's Fund Society and the American Society of Painters in Water Colors, he also exhibited regularly at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Brooklyn Art Association. By exhibiting his works across the country--in Boston, Chicago, Saint Louis, Cleveland, San Francisco—and in Paris, Sonntag enjoyed a widespread reputation throughout his career.
A View in Vermont, ca. 1874
Oil on canvas, 27 1/8 x 40 1/8 in. (68.9 x 101.9 cm)
Signed (lower left): W. L. Sonntag
Grace Judd Landers Fund (1946.1)
“A View in Vermont” is a marvelous example of Sonntag's panoramic views of the American wilderness. A central body of water leads the eye diagonally into a mountainous, forested, brilliantly colored landscape. The foreground is highly detailed, showing a variety of trees and shrubbery; the distant mountain peaks are suffused with light and dissolve in pale yellow and purple mists. Representative of Sonntag’s "classic" period--roughly 1855 to 1875, when he and the Hudson River School were at the height of their popularity--the painting is characteristic of the artist in its subject and composition. (1)
Sonntag preferred the edge of the wilderness--often only a few figures inhabit his scenery. In the New Britain painting, they are a pair of fisherman who are distinguished by their long poles and brightly colored vests. Sitting on the shore, leisurely enjoying the beautiful day, they provide a sense of scale and an entrée into the scene. Nearby, the chopped-off tree stumps show evidence of human settlement, the first steps in the inevitable march of progress whereby the valley will eventually be populated.
While the topographic detail and basic format of the picture have much in common with the formulas developed by Sonntag's Hudson River School contemporaries, Sonntag was often singled out for his striking, almost hyperrealistic, use of color. His canvases are accentuated by lush greens and blues brighter and bolder than those actually found in nature: note, for example, the bright aquamarine column of smoke emanating from the log cabin on the far river bank in “View in Vermont”. Sonntag was well known for his autumn scenes, in which he harmonized the cool greens with the russets and browns of autumn and the reds of bare rock surfaces. Noting the artist’s "system of coloring and his way of producing effects," the “Cosmopolitan Art Journal” found "much that is fresh, original, and decidedly pleasing"; in contrast, critic James Jackson Jarves decried Sonntag's "wildly picturesque" views as a "absolutely disagreeable." (2)
During the 1870s Sonntag exhibited a number of canvases depicting Vermont scenes, though it is not known exactly when he visited the state. (3) By 1875, when Sonntag exhibited the New Britain painting at the National Academy of Design, the Hudson River landscape was considered "traditional and obsolescent"; a critic for “Scribner's Monthly” sarcastically commented: "Mr. Sonntag favors us with what might pass for a rude design for an Indian shawl, but is stated to be a view in Vermont." (4)
MAS
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
"William Louis Sonntag," “Cosmopolitan Art Journal” 3 (December 1858): 26-28; William Sonntag Miles, “William L. Sonntag”, 1822-1899; “William L. Sonntag, Jr.”, 1869-1898, exhib. Cat. (Boston: Vose Galleries), 1970; Nancy Dustin Wall Moure, “William Louis Sonntag: Artist of the Ideal”, 1822-1900 (Los Angeles: Goldfield Galleries, 1980).
Notes:
1. Moure, “William Louis Sonntag”, pp. 49-50.
2. "William Louis Sonntag,” p. 28; James Jackson Jarves, “The Art-Idea” (1864; reprint, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1960), p. 193.
3. Moure, “William Louis Sonntag”, p. 30.
4. "Culture and Progress: The Academy of Design," “Scribner's Monthly” 10 (June 1875): 251. Other than this writer, critics seem to have been indifferent to “View in Vermont” in 1875, though only a few years later several others listed the canvas among Sonntag's most famous; see John Denison Champlin Jr., ed., “Cyclopedia of Painters and Paintings”, 4 vols. (1885-87; reprint, Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1969), vol. 4, p. 204; Clara Erskine Clement Waters and Laurence Hutton, “Artists of the Nineteenth Century and Their Works”, 7th ed., 2 vols. in 1 (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1894; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1969), vol. 2, p. 264).
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