William Sommer

He apprenticed with the Detroit Calvert Lithograph Company for seven years but in 1890 he traveled to Europe where he trained with Professors Johann Herterich, Ludwig Schmid, and Adolph Menzel.

He worked on several large-scale murals for the Federal Art Project, including Rural Homestead in the Geneva, Ohio post office.

Sommer was an acknowledged leader of the "Cleveland School," a group of Cleveland-based artists who were active from the teens through the mid-1940s.

These artists formed the core of an art community whose size and activity paralleled the growth and energy of Cleveland during that period.

Sommer painted from the turn of the 20th century into the 1940s, absorbing the ideas of the Cubists and other adventurous artists of that time and integrating these concepts and techniques into his own work.