A native of East Liberty, Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh, William Sonntag was a landscape painter associated with the Hudson River School. He is best remembered for his romantic depictions of the American wilderness and "idealized visions of classical Italian ruins" that "reflect the influence of the eighteenth-century neoclassical tradition of English literature and painting" (Zellman, 195).

He pursued his art career despite parental objections, and in the 1840s moved to Cincinnati where it is thought he studied at the Cincinnati Academy of Fine Arts under Godfrey Frankenstein. From the early 1840s to the mid 1850s, he had a studio in Cincinnati and made numerous painting trips in the Ohio River Valley and into t...