A painter of big skies at the Michener Editorial Staff
James A. Michener Art Museum, gift of Charles W. Hargens Jr.
Pennsylvania impressionist George Sotter (1879–1953) excelled as a stained-glass artist before he turned his talents to landscape painting, and his facility with that first medium perhaps gave him a special understanding of the effects of light and color. Sotter’s specialty was the sky, and in his depictions of day or night, the heavens seem to pulse with an inner force.
Sotter left a stained-glass studio in his native Pittsburgh in his early twenties to attend the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, where he studied with Thomas Anshutz, William Merritt Chase, and most significantly Edward Redfield, a leader of the New Hope School of impressionism and one of the most celebrated landscape painters of the day.