| William Sommer | ||
| Birth Date: January 18, 1867 |
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| Death Date: 1949 Artist Gallery |
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| William Sommer was born into an immigrant German family in Detroit in 1867, grew up over his father’s grocery store, took art lessons as a child, and age fourteen apprenticed as a lithographer. After several years of commercial lithography in Detroit, Boston, New York and England – interrupted by a year’s study of art in Germany – Sommer moved to Cleveland to work for the Otis Lithography Company in 1907.
Much of what he learned about art he learned in Cleveland. From Abel Warshawksy, home from Paris around 1910, Sommer first learned Impressionist techniques. William Zorach returned from Paris a year or so later with fresher news: Post Impressionism. Sommer travel to New York in 1913 to see the Armory Show, bought art and philosophy books at Richard Laukhuff’s Cleveland bookstore. The ‘teens were good years for Sommer. He moved his wife and sons to Brandywine and there in an old schoolhouse studio he worked through the new ideas crowding in on him.
It was the watercolors Sommer painted in Brandywine in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s that attracted keen interest in New York. His use of color is fresh and startling, reminiscent of the post-Impressionists in its sensuousness and in the way it is orchestrated for effect. Sommer was a brilliant draughtsman. He is said to have been able to draw a life-size figure of a woman, taking his stick of charcoal and beginning at the top of the head and going all the way to the ankles without a tremor and never erasing.
With the death of his wife in 1945, the center of stability went out of his life. He spent more time than ever now at Morman’s Tavern, gave away drawings and paintings left and right for a bottle or on a moment’s whim. In 1946 the probate court, at the request of his family, appointed the Akron Art Institute legal custodian of Sommer’s works. Sam Loveman, a friend, believed Sommer was devastated on his return from a drinking binge to find his studio stripped clean, his stacks of canvases and watercolors, the piles of sketchpads and notebooks gone. Three miserable and unproductive years later, his much abused kidneys gave out.
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