SONNTAG: HUDSON RIVER PAINTER
by Joan K. Yanni
Catskill Panorama (38.40) by William Sonntag was given to the Gallery in 1938 by Hannah Gould and was recently restored at the Williamstown Regional Arts Conservation Laboratory through funds donated by the Elizabeth F. Cheyney Foundation. The undated painting shows an autumn landscape framed by broken or cut branches, trees and mountains. A lone figure sits fishing; his rustic cabin can be seen on the right of the canvas. A lake or river in the foreground flows upward into a distant, mountainous mist.
Sonntag (1822-1900) is associated with the second generation of the Hudson River School, and was a friend of Asher B. Durand (Genesee Oaks), Frederic Church, and Worthington Whittredge. The Hudson River painters, popular from around 1826 to 1876, are known for their meticulous, realistic detail and romantic feeling for nature. Cole, Durand and Thomas Doughty, and later, Church and Albert Bierstadt, were prime figures in the school. Cole (1801-1848) and Bierstadt (1830-1902) are represented in the Gallery’s collection, as are other artists of the time: John Kensett (1816-1872), Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904), Jasper Cropsey (1823-1900) and genre painters Eastman Johnson (1824-1906), Lilly Martin Spencer (1822-1900) and David Blythe (1815-1865).
Sonntag was born in Pittsburgh in 1822 to a family which proudly traced its roots to 13th-century Saxony and the American Revolution. He grew up in Cincinnati, where his father was a successful merchant. How William became interested in painting is not known; it is known, however, that his father viewed the study of art as impractical, and tried to deter his son from following it as a career. He sent William on a trip to the Wisconsin territory to take his mind off art, but William returned with a love for the wild, untamed landscape he had seen and was determined to paint it.
Nothing is knows about Sonntag’s art teachers, so he probably either was self-taught or learned from a minor artist. In 1846 he exhibited his first work at the American Art Union in New York City and was hired by the proprietor of a Western Museum in Cincinnati to paint dioramas for exhibitions. Money from this venture gave him the means to open his own studio, where a patron encouraged him to paint his first important work, The Progress of Civilization, a four-painting series probably inspired by Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire. At the time, paintings with religious or allegorical themes were considered the highest artistic level to which an artist could aspire.
In 1849 the Cincinnati Directory lists him as a painter of circus wagons—not an unusual way for a painter to earn money. In 1851 his only panorama, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained was exhibited at P.T. Barnum’s American Museum (See MAG’s The Burning of Barnum’s Museum) and in other cities throughout the country to crowds who paid to see it.
In 1851, at the age of 29, he met and married 16-year-old Mary Ann Cowdell. Their honeymoon was a trip paid for by the director of the B&O Railroad, who had commissioned the artist to paint that line’s wild and picturesque scenery. At the time, railroad trips were touted as pleasant excursions during which America’s wilderness could be viewed in comfort, and Sonntag’s paintings were to serve as advertising.
In 1853 Sonntag submitted one of his paintings to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia—the first of many to be accepted—and he took his first recorded trip to Europe. After his return, he painted several Italian landscapes, which were favorably reviewed. Eventually he settled in New York City, and by the late 1850s was at the height of his popularity. He was elected an associate of the prestigious National Academy of Design in 1860, and exhibited his work at the Boston Athenaeum in 1869. In Boston he probably got his first look at the French Barbizon School paintings, which had been introduced to America there—a style of quickly painted, intimate, romantic scenes of nature that influenced his later work.
In 1869, after eighteen years of marriage, Sonntag and Mary Ann had a son, William, Jr., and in 1871 a daughter. William, Jr. eventually became an artist known for his illustrations. As Sonntag aged, his style became looser, more relaxed. He also became interested in watercolors and began exhibiting with the Water Color Society of New York. A portrait of the artist James Beard (The Night Before the Battle) is one of his few known portraits.
By the 1890s, sales of work by Hudson River artists had slowed, out of vogue in a society that had begun to revere genre painting and European “modern art.” Sonntag died in New York City in 1900.
No comments:
Post a Comment