The Virginia paintings of American landscape painter William Louis Sonntag (1822-1900) have gone unexplored in present scholarship devoted to the artist. Examining Sonntags relationship with radical abolitionist patron Elias Lyman Magoon exposes latent abolitionist tenets within Sonntags Virginia landscapes. Sonntags Virginia paintings also embody the artists revisions of American memory in response to the Civil War. The exhibition history of these works places them further within the context of American cultural reform. Sonntags Virginia landscapes will be subsequently read as the artists perceptions of a changing America.