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 :. | upplandskt landskap | skrakar | Sleeping Jeppe | svanar | Eiders at Sunrise |
Related Artists:
George Henry Durrie
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Louis Bleuler
Swiss, 1792-1850
Jean-Germain Drouais
1763-1788 French Jean Germain Drouais Locations Son of Francois-Hubert Drouais. He trained first with his father and in 1778 enrolled at the Academie Royale, becoming a pupil of Nicolas-Guy Brenet. Around 1781 he entered Jacques-Louis David studio as one of his first pupils. The following year, though not officially entered for the competition, he painted that year Prix de Rome subject, the Return of the Prodigal Son (Paris, St Roch), presumably as a trial for his own edification. The picture has a friezelike composition and reveals both the influence of Jean-Francois Peyron and David as well as debts to Poussin and Italian 17th-century sources. In 1783 Drouais reached the Prix de Rome final with the Resurrection of the Son of the Widow of Nain (Le Mans, Mus. Tesse) but was eliminated from the competition in extraordinary circumstances: impatient to know his master opinion, Drouais cut a section off the canvas and smuggled it out of the competition rooms. David acknowledged it to be the best thing his favourite pupil had yet done, but by his hasty action Drouais had disqualified himself. However, the following year he won the prize, and great acclaim, with the Woman of Canaan at the Feet of Christ (Paris, Louvre), an extremely accomplished piece influenced by Poussin work and David Belisarius (Lille, Mus. B.-A.).