Extraordinary Gifts: Selected Paintings from The Procter and Gamble Collection at the Cincinnati Art Museum February 15, 2003 to September 12, 2004 Extraordinary Gifts: Selected Paintings from The Procter and Gamble Collection at the Cincinnati Art Museum Cincinnati Art Museum logo
A Word from P&G - Overview of Extraordinary Gifts: Selected Paintings from The Procter and Gamble Collection at the Cincinnati Art Museum Cincinnati Painters and the Big Picture - discusses how Cincinnati Artists fit into a larger art historical perspective The Works from The P&G Collection - themed galleries of the works in the show Index by Artist Name - a list of all the artists represented in the show and the works they completed Go back to the Cincinnati Art Museum Home page
William Louis Sonntag (1822–1900)
Mountain Landscape with Lake, ca. 1865
oil on canvas
33 x 56 1/4 in.

Born outside of Pittsburgh, Sonntag came to Cincinnati as a child and eventually became one of the city’s most successful landscape painters. Dubbed “the landscape painter of the age” by The Cincinnati Enquirer, Sonntag started out painting the scenery of Kentucky, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. But by the 1860s these areas were home to many Civil War battles, making sketching excursions far too dangerous. He then turned to the safer terrain of the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

In this example, a small shimmering lake is surrounded by groves of trees, and the distant mountains are covered with a hazy mist. This panoramic scene could be near Crawford Notch, a five-mile gorge splitting through the mountains, where Sonntag often spent his summers in the mid-1860s. Back in Cincinnati, audiences applauded Sonntag’s New England paintings; a similar landscape was highly praised by one reviewer for its “poetic beauty and atmospheric effect.”