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 :. | grunt vatten | barrskog med skogsmard anfallande en orrhona | orn jagande hare | Foxes | Ravhona med ungar och byte |
Related Artists:
Sir Edward Coley Burne-jones,Bart.,ARA,RWS
1833-1898
Jean Raoux
French Painter, 1677-1734, French painter. He trained first in Montpellier with Antoine Ranc (1634-1716), in whose studio he completed his early painting Ariadne on Naxos (1701; Montpellier, Mus. Fabre). He subsequently moved to the Paris studio of Bon Boullogne and in 1704 won the Prix de Rome with David Slaying Goliath (untraced). He completed his education at the Acad?mie de France in Rome and also spent time in Florence and Padua. For the Cathedral at Padua he executed an Annunciation and a Visitation (both in situ). In 1707-9 Raoux was in Venice, where he made contact with his future patron Philippe de Vendeme (1665-1727), Grand Prior of the Order of the Knights of Malta. From 1714 he lodged in the Grand Prior's Paris residence, the Temple, a privilege that was renewed in 1719 by Vendeme's successor Jean-Philippe,
Ivan Khrutsky
1810-1885 Russian Ivan Khrutsky Gallery was a Russian-Polish painter known by his still-lives and portraits. He was born Ivan Fomich Khrutsky into a family descended from Polish gentry in the village of Ula, Vitebsk Gubernia (currently Belarus). In 1827, Khrutsky came to St. Petersburg and in 1830 entered the Imperial Academy of Arts. His first known works are dated 1832. The paintings gradually gathered public and critical acclaim. Khrutsky also worked as an interior designer, and became a popular amongst the wealthy home owners. In 1836, Khrutsky was awarded the Major Silver medal of the Academy for his still-lifes. Khrutsky also executed nice genre pictures and portraits. Old Woman Knitting a Sock, brought him the Minor Gold medal of the Academy. In 1839 he was awarded the title of the Academician. After his father??s death in 1840 Khrutsky left St. Petersburg forever and settled in the family estate Zakharenichi (Zacharniczy), Polotsk region. This period was one of commissioned religious art, mostly from Lithuania. Besides religious paintings he also worked on portraits, such as I.I. Glazunov's, Joseph Semashko's, Mikolaj Malinowski's and others. He died in 1885.