William Louis Sonntag Sr. 1

Fishing at the Lake

mid-19th Century

A luminous Autumn oil on canvas board landscape, probably of the hills in the Hudson River Valley, by the noted American artist William Louis Sonntag (1822-1900). Signed in the lower right. Sonntag was born near Pittsburgh, PA and moved to Cincinnati, OH in the 1840’s to study art. He studied for a brief time with G. Frankenstein at the Cincinnati Academy of Fine Art and his idealized paintings of American wilderness and visionary paintings of imagined European ruins were commercially successful. He traveled twice to Europe in the 1850’s to improve his skills, eventually settling in New York City. He joined the National Academy of Design, where he exhibited his works for forty years. His mature works identify him with the Hudson River School of landscape painters. A romantic and naturalistic painter of his surroundings, Sonntag also created idealized paintings of Roman ruins, recalling his European trips of earlier years. Sonntag was an Associate (1860) and Academician (1861) at the National Academy of Design, and a member of the American Watercolor Society, Artists Fund Society, and the American Art Union...

Signed lower left. (Born in Yorkshire, England in 1927; died in 2008). Dinsdale painted the sea and great ships of the era when “Britannia ruled the waves” with her fleets of clipper and fighting ships...