Bruno Andreas Liljefors (1860-1939) was a Swedish artist, the most important and probably the most influential wildlife painter of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.[1] He also drew some sequential picture stories, making him one of the early Swedish comic creators. Liljefors is held in high esteem by painters of wildlife and is acknowledged as an influence, for example, by American wildlife artist Bob Kuhn.[1] All his life Liljefors was a hunter, and he often painted predator-prey action, the hunts engaged between fox and hare, sea eagle and eider, and goshawk and black grouse serving as prime examples.[1] However, he never exaggerated the ferocity of the predator or the pathos of the prey, and his pictures are devoid of sentimentality. The influence of the Impressionists can be seen in his attention to the effects of environment and light, and later that of Art Nouveau in his Mallards, Evening of 1901, in which the pattern of the low sunlight on the water looks like leopardskin, hence the Swedish nickname Panterfällen.[1] Bruno was fascinated by the patterns to be found in nature, and he often made art out of the camouflage patterns of animals and birds. He particularly loved painting capercaillies against woodland, and his most successful painting of this subject is the largescale Capercaillie Lek, 1888, in which he captures the atmosphere of the forest at dawn. He was also influenced by Japanese art, for example in his Goldfinches of the late 1880s.[1] During the last years of the nineteenth century, a brooding element entered his work, perhaps the result of turmoil in his private life, as he left his wife, Anna, and took up with her younger sister, Signe, and was often short of money.[1] This darker quality in his paintings gradually began to attract interest and he had paintings exhibited at the Paris Salon. He amassed a collection of animals to act as his living models. Ernst Malmberg recalled: The animals seemed to have an instinctive trust and actual attraction to him...There in his animal enclosure, we saw his inevitable power over its many residents??foxes, badgers, hares, squirrels, weasels, an eagle, eagle owl, hawk, capercaillie and black game.[1] The greatness of Liljefors lay in his ability to show animals in their environment.[1] Sometimes he achieved this through hunting and observation of the living animal, and sometimes he used dead animals: for example his Hawk and Black Game, painted in the winter of 1883-4, was based on dead specimens, but he also used his memory of the flocks of black grouse in the meadows around a cottage he once lived in at Ehrentuna, near Uppsala. He wrote: The hawk model??a young one??I killed myself. Everything was painted out of doors as was usually done in those days. It was a great deal of work trying to position the dead hawk and the grouse among the bushes that I bent in such a way as to make it seem lively, although the whole thing was in actuality a still life.[1]   Related Paintings of bruno liljefors :. | tallar | Fox in Winter Landscape | katt pa blommande sommarang | stenskvatta | vildgass upplandsk oversvamning |
Related Artists:
Andries van Eertvelt
1590-1652 Flemish Andries van Eertvelt Location Flemish painter. He enrolled as a member of Antwerp Guild of St Luke in 1609. In 1615 he married Catherine Vlieger (d 1627), after whose death he went to Genoa, where he worked for Cornelis de Wael. By c. 1630 he was back in Antwerp, where he had his portrait painted by Anthony van Dyck (1632; Augsburg, Schaezlerpal.). In 1633 Eertvelt married Elisabeth Boots, probably a daughter of the Antwerp painter Jan Boots (b before 1620). Eertvelt is regarded as the first Flemish marine painter. Over the years his palette and style changed. His first paintings, mostly of ships in storms (e.g. Sea Battle in a Storm; Schwerin, Staatl. Mus.), were painted in greenish-black and brown tones, often using white to highlight the rigging against the dark sea. After his tour of Italy he favoured views of southern harbours, with calm seas painted in soft tones (e.g. Spanish Ships Leaving a Port; Vienna, Ksthist. Mus.). In his day Eertvelt was a man of distinction whose artistic qualities were praised by the poet Cornelis de Bie and whose marine paintings were appreciated abroad, some being exported as far as Seville and Lisbon. His pupils included Gaspard van Eyck (1613-73), Hendrik Minderhout (1632-96) and Matthieu van Plattenberg.
RUYSCH, Rachel
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1664-1750 Dutch painter. She specialized in still-lifes of flowers and fruits and still-lifes in outdoor settings, the large majority signed, with dated examples from 1681 to 1747 providing a sound chronology. She is widely regarded as the most gifted woman in the history of the subject and among the greatest exponents of either sex. Ruysch came from a distinguished and wealthy background. Her father, Frederik Ruysch (1638-1731), was an eminent professor of anatomy and botany, who published his fine collection of natural curiosities. He was also a gifted amateur painter. Her mother was the daughter of the architect Pieter Post. At the age of 15 Ruysch became a pupil of Willem van Aelst until his death in 1683. In 1693 she married the portrait painter Juriaen Pool (1665-1745), a happy union that produced ten children. In 1709 the couple moved to The Hague, where both artists joined the Guild of St Luke. From 1708 to 1713 they were both court painters to the Elector Palatine, John William, at D?sseldorf, for whom they continued to work until his death in 1716. In that year they returned to Amsterdam, where Ruysch continued working until at least the age of 83.
Chase, William Merritt
American Impressionist Painter, 1849-1916 American painter and printmaker. He received his early training in Indianapolis from the portrait painter Barton S. Hays (1826-75). In 1869 he went to New York to study at the National Academy of Design where he exhibited in 1871. That year he joined his family in St Louis, where John Mulvaney (1844-1906) encouraged him to study in Munich. With the support of several local patrons, enabling him to live abroad for the next six years, Chase entered the K?nigliche Akademie in Munich in 1872. Among his teachers were Alexander von Wagner (1838-1919), Karl Theodor von Piloty and Wilhelm von Diez (1839-1907). Chase also admired the work of Wilhelm Leibl. The school emphasized bravura brushwork, a technique that became integral to Chase's style, favoured a dark palette and encouraged the study of Old Master painters, particularly Diego Vel?zquez and Frans Hals. Among Chase's friends in Munich were the American artists Walter Shirlaw, J. Frank Currier and Frederick Dielman (1847-1935),