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...

Oil on canvas, signed in the lower right featuring a vibrant street in Paris. Henri Alexis Schaeffer (1900-1975) was born in Paris, France in e...

Beautiful example of the Hudson River School romantic bucolic New York autumn landscape with cows foraging. Illegible artist signature on stretcher bar (See enhanced images). Condition: very good; professionally cleaned and minor restoration upper right hand corner where paint was missing. Unframed. Image size: 14"H x 24"W x .75"D Hudson River School was an informal association was America's first so-called school of painting and the dominant landscape style until the Civil War. The name derives from a group of 19th-century landscape painters working in New York state. With realistic composition, they depicted romantic views of unsettled areas of the Hudson River Valley especially lakes, rocky gorges, and forests in the Catskill Mountains. About a fourth of these artists utilized luminism or effects with special lighting techniques to convey lofty emotions through contrasts of light and dark. Included in this Hudson River luminist category were Washington Allston, Albert Bierstadt, William Hart, and Frederic Edwin Church...

Substantial and period painting of Yellowstone Falls by an unknown artist (American, 19th-20th Century), c.1880-1898. Unsigned. With a plaque "Yellow...