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 :. | Studie till Ung tjaderskytt | rav och morkulla | Vinterhare vid gardesgard | fallannde vildgass | taltrast vid boet |
Related Artists:
CECCO DEL CARAVAGGIO
Italian Baroque Era Painter, active ca.1610-1620 Painter active in Italy. His nationality is not known. He was a follower of Caravaggio, and his rare works reveal a highly original and idiosyncratic response to that artist's naturalism. Agostino Tassi mentioned him as involved, with several French artists, in the decoration of the Villa Lante at Bagnaia between 1613 and 1615,
Barent fabritius
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1624-1673 Painter and draughtsman, brother of Carel Fabritius. Like Carel, he was first taught painting by his father, also learnt carpentry and practised as an artisan in Midden-Beemster in 1641. He is documented in Amsterdam in 1643 and 1647, though it is not known if, like his brother, he was also a pupil of Rembrandt. Nevertheless, his style is similar to that of the Rembrandt school. He must have been trained in the second half of the 1640s. His work is reminiscent of the style of his brother, who clearly influenced and may also have instructed him. In 1652 Barent lived in Amsterdam and married Catharina Mussers in Midden-Beemster. In the following years he is documented alternately in Midden-Beemster and Amsterdam. He painted a group portrait of the town master builder, Willem Leenderstsz. van der Helm and his Family (1656; Amsterdam, Rijksmus.), in Leiden, and in 1660-61 he received further commissions for the Lutheran church in Leiden. From 1669 Barent lived with his family in Amsterdam, where he died at the age of 49. He was buried in the churchyard in Leiden that was usually reserved for the poorer inhabitants of Amsterdam.
Adriaen van de Velde
(bapt. 30 November 1636, Amsterdam - bur. 21 January 1672, Amsterdam), was a Dutch animal and landscape painter, son of Willem van de Velde the Elder and brother of Willem van de Velde the Younger, the marine painter. Adriaen did not want to become a marine painter so he was trained in the studio of Jan Wynants, the landscape painter. There he made the acquaintance of Philip Wouwerman, who is believed to have aided him in his studies of animals, and to have exercised a powerful and beneficial influence upon his art. Having made exceptionally rapid progress, he was soon employed by his master to introduce figures into his landscape compositions, and he rendered a similar service to Hobbema, Ruysdael, Verboom and other contemporary artists. According to Houbraken, he died while in collaboration with Jan van der Heyden and Frederik de Moucheron, painting animals on their paintings.[1] His favourite subjects were scenes of open pasture land, with sheep, cattle and goats, which he executed with dexterity, with much precision of touch and truth of draughtsmanship, and with clear silvery colouring. He painted a few small winter scenes with skaters, and several religious subjects, such as the Descent from the Cross, for a Roman Catholic hidden church in Amsterdam. In addition to his paintings, of which nearly two hundred have been catalogued, he executed about twenty etchings, several of which appear from their dates to have been done in his fourteenth year. They are distinguished by directness of method and by delicacy and certainty of touch. Van de Velde lived in Kalverstraat, near the Regulierspoort.