William Sotheby William Frederic Sotheby was a California Impressionist painter who was born in Nuremberg, Germany in 1864. He studied art at the Royal Academy in Munich before emigrating to New York City in 1895. Much of his young life was spent at sea, and it was here that he was imbued with the wonder of the ocean in all of it turgidly beautiful moods. His career as an artist would be almost exclusively devoted to capturing the sea with its many personalities, mostly in its mode of surf crashing against the rocky coast of the Monterey Peninsula in northern California that was to him so beloved. Here, on the rocky cliffs he built a home called "Castellammare", named for an Italian seaport town south of Naples, and was seen often in his sarong perched high in the gnarled branches of the Monterey cypresses and pines, ever studying the ocean in its many temperanments. Sotheby settled in Carmel in 1911, becoming one of the first artists to establish residence there subsequent to the devastating earthquake in San Francisco in 1906.Sotheby's paintings of the sea were well received from coast to coast, and he participated in many exhibtions from San Francisco to New York, including the Panama Pacific Exposition in 1915, the National Academy of Design, and the Salmagundi Club. He died in Carmel in 1949 leaving a wonderful legacy of the sea in his brilliant canvases.

Biography with permission from AskArt.com

Newport Art ~ 29 Bowens Wharf, Newport RI 02840 ~ 401-847-5250