WILLIAM LOUIS SONNTAG 1822-1900
Landscape, 1865
Oil on canvas, 32 X 48" (81.28 x 121.92 cm.)
Signed, lower left
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph P. Sontich, 970-0-123

William Sonntag's first landscapes may have been the dioramas he painted about 1846 for the Western Museum in Cincinnati, where his family had moved about 1823 from the painter's birthplace, East Liberty, Pennsylvania, now part of Pittsburgh. His father, a prosperous apothecary and wholesale grocer, tried to discourage his interest in art. An apprenticeship to a carpenter lasted only three days; one to an architect, three months. A trip through the wild country along the upper Mississippi River to the Wisconsin Territory about 1840, probably connected with his father's business, only served to whet the young mans appetite for landscape painting, and subsequent travels were the sources for a Kentucky river scene exhibited at the American Art-Union in 1846. The next year he sold seven pictures to the newly founded Western Art-Union in Cincinnati.
By the 1850s, Sonnitag's career was at its height in Cincinnati. Around 1852, he painted for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad the wild scenery in the Allegheny Mountains along its route. An eight-month trip to Europe in 1853, with five thousand dollars in commissions to fulfill, and another in 1855 provided such opportunities that he formed, but never carried out, plans to settle permanently in Florence, Italy, though he did go abroad in 1861 and quite possibly again in 1862. By 1857 Sonntag, had moved from Cincinnati to New York, where he lived until his death. In 1858 he sketched in Virginia and in the summer of 1860 in West Virginia. When the Civil War closed the South to travel, Sonntag began to spend summers in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, where he continued to go the rest of his life.
Landscape follows the formula on which Sonntag settled for many of his paintings. The season is early autumn and from an elevated viewpoint the viewer looks toward successively higher and more distant mountains across a small body of water, whose shining surface reflects the sunset pink of the sky and silhouettes the foreground rocks and fallen trees. The manner in which this red glow tinges the edges of rocks and trees and the density of the deeply shadowed forest with its twisted, writhing trees is reminiscent of Thomas Cole and Sonntag's style of the 1850s. The painting may indeed be earlier than the 1865 seemingly indicated by the almost illegibly inscribed date. Like so many Sonntag landscapes, it lacks a specific title, but its closer resemblance to his scenes of the Alleghenies in Virginia rather than the White Mountains of New Hampshire would argue for a southern subject.

WILLIAM S. TALBOT