William Louis Sonntag was born to a family of German extraction in East Liberty, Pennsylvania, a small town that is now a part of Pittsburgh. Sonntag’s family moved the following year to Cincinnati. Although his desire to be an artist dated from an early age, his father doubted the practicality of such a career and instead apprenticed the young Sonntag to a carpenter. This apprenticeship was short-lived, as were other attempts to dissuade Sonntag from the arts. Some time around 1842, Sonntag’s father relented, and the young aspiring artist sought art instruction. Since no records of any schooling survive, it has been suggested that Sonntag was possibly self-taught.
In 1846, while he was supporting himself by working locally as a diorama painter, Sonntag exhibited a landscape of Kentucky at the American Art-Union, New York, marking the first time that his work was featured in a major art arena. Soon thereafter, he opened his own studio in Cincinnati, and it was then that he produced his first major work. The Reverend Elias Lyman Magoon, a Baptist minister in Cincinnati, encouraged Sonntag to paint a series of paintings based on “The Ages,” a poem by William Cullen Bryant. The result was the four-painting Progress of Civilization (location unknown), which was almost certainly inspired by Thomas Cole’s famous Course of Empire series (The New-York Historical Society). In 1850, Sonntag painted his only known panorama, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained (location unknown), based on Milton’s epic poem. It was exhibited at P. T. Barnum’s American Museum, New York, in 1851. Both projects, in scope and subject, did much to add to Sonntag’s reputation, and established him as a promising and ambitious young artist.
In 1853, Sonntag made his first trip to Europe, armed with commissions for landscapes of European subjects and accompanied by fellow Cincinnati artists John R. Tait and Robert S. Duncanson. The trio remained in Europe for eight months. Although Sonntag’s itinerary is not precisely known, it is believed that he traveled to Paris and London, where he may have received some artistic instruction. Upon his return, and after a brief stay in New York, Sonntag returned to Cincinnati, where he completed the commissions that funded his European sojourn.
Sonntag returned to Europe in 1855, staying primarily in Florence, on a trip that was central to subsequent developments in his career. Italian rather than American landscapes now predominated in his oeuvre. Sonntag came home to America sometime in the summer of 1856 and settled in New York, frequently shuttling back and forth to Cincinnati, where he likely maintained a number of patrons. As the demand for his Italian landscapes grew, Sonntag seems to have entertained the idea of expatriating himself to Italy, as revealed in the following notice in the Cosmopolitan Art Journal:
Sonntag remains in town, busy with his many commissions. He will remain in this country until next summer, when, with his family, he will “emigrate” to Italy, for a permanent residence. He proposes to devote his life there to his art, and has it in his mind’s intent to produce greater works than have yet come from his hands (“Our Artists and Their Whereabouts,” Cosmopolitan Art Journal II [September 1858], p. 209).
Sonntag never moved permanently to Italy, although he evidently made several return trips during the 1860s. Perhaps he had earned enough commissions in the wake of his success that he became reluctant to leave America. He now turned increasingly toward local, rather than foreign, subjects for his canvases, as the taste for Italian subjects began to wane. In 1869, Sonntag’s first child was born, which perhaps prompted him to settle in New York, where he remained until his death. Sonntag’s output remained high, but over the years he began to incorporate influences from the Barbizon School, abandoning his earlier, more personal style. Sonntag appears to have been a family man who, once settled, placed more emphasis on securing a steady income than pursuing the type of ambitious career he had courted in his youth. He did remain within the established art circles, though, as he exhibited regularly at the National Academy of Design; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; the Brooklyn Art Association, New York; and the Boston Athenaeum.
