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William Louis Sonntag, N.A. (American, 1822-1900), "Figures Hunting and Fishing at Sunset", 1846, oil on canvas, signed and dated lower left, 40 in. x 50 in., framed Provenance: Parke-Bernet Galleries, NY, Oct. 22, 1969, lot 28 and Oct. 16, 1974, lot 42 (as “Two Hunters in a Mountain Landscape”); A South Louisiana Estate; Collection of a well-known Louisiana Artist Exh. (most likely): American Art Union, NY, 1846, no. 62 (as “View on the Licking River, KY”) Pub.: Moure, Nancy Dustin Wall. William Louis Sonntag, Artist of the Ideal. Los Angeles: Goldfield Galleries, 1980; p. 143, cat. no. I.327 Note: This splendid picture appears to be an astonishing discovery and is almost certainly one of the first dated paintings by the twenty-four year old Sonntag, one of the best-known and most celebrated artists of the Hudson River School. The artist’s signature, with its date of 1846, is in the same position, handwriting, and paint color as appears on his 32 x 48 inch canvas Scene on the Ohio River of 1852 (Moure 1980, p. 126, no I.373, color plate 9). The unusually large and dramatic composition of the work offered here exemplifies the unabashedly Romantic style which characterized the painter’s first independent decade. Sonntag derived much of his earliest manner from a devoted study of Thomas Cole (1801-1848), the celebrated American master. Over the course of his painterly beginnings, Sonntag found rugged landscapes fully as wild and evocative as those of Cole. His itinerant career first took him throughout famously picturesque regions of Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia, into which his most natural access was the Licking River, likely depicted here, whose tortuous course winds directly southeast from Cincinnati to its source in the heart of the Cumberland range of the Allegheny Mountains. In 1846, after receiving a contract from the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad to record the landscape along the rail route, Sonntag opened a studio in Cincinnati, his home from 1823 to 1853. This painting is all the more rare in that Sonntag’s subsequent paintings of the later 1840s as is known from an American Art Union exhibition to which he contributed in 1850 are mostly quite small. The only known exceptions are two nearly comparably large pictures dated 1850, Duck Hunters on the Ohio River and In the American Wilderness. The present painting, lot 221, which pays homage to previous painters both living and already apotheosized, testifies to both Sonntag’s youthful talent and his inspired investigation of the sublime. Ref.: Moure, Nancy Dustin Wall. William Louis Sonntag, Artist of the Ideal. Los Angeles: Goldfield Galleries, 1980; Birmingham, Peter and Jane Turner, ed.. Sonntag. Grove Dictionary of Art. London: Oxford University Press, 1996, vol. 29, pp. 73-74; Howat, John K. The Hudson River and its Painters. New York: American Federation of the Arts, 1972, pp. 176-177, pl. 78.