William Sommer: life and works

William Sommer (1867–1949) was an American Modernist painter.

William Sommer was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1867. He was largely self-taught, but traditional instruction early on from artiste and advertisement lithographer Julius Melchers. He apprenticed past the Detroit Calvert Lithograph Company for seven years but in 1890 he traveled to Europe where he trained in the song of Professors Johann Herterich, Ludwig Schmid, and Adolph Menzel. In 1907 he accepted a position taking into consideration the Otis Lithograph Company of Cleveland, Ohio and in 1911 he co-founded the Kokoon Arts Club to promote unbiased art in Cleveland. In 1914 he relocated to Brandywine, Ohio. He worked on several large-scale murals for the Federal Art Project, including Rural Homestead in the Geneva, Ohio read out office.

Artist William Sommer spent most of his liveliness in Summit County near Brandywine Falls. Sommer was an expected leader of the “Cleveland School,” a charity of Cleveland-based artists who were responsive from the youth through the mid-1940s. These artists formed the core of an art community whose size and upheaval paralleled the accrual and sparkle of Cleveland during that period. Sommer painted from the position of the 20th century into the 1940s, absorbing the ideas of the Cubists and further adventurous artists of that time and integrating these concepts and techniques into his own work. His subjects were adequately rooted in the American midwest, however; favorite subjects included young children and farm scenes.

He continued to paint until his death in 1949. Hart Crane dedicated his 1927 poem Sunday Morning Apples to Sommer.