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 :. | Rav i skogsparti | fyra jagande hundar isho | ravugar | ejdrar pa skaret | taltrast vid boet |
Related Artists:
Carnicero, Antonio
Spanish, approx. 1748-1814 Painter and draughtsman, son of Alejandro Carnicero. He arrived at the Court in Madrid with his father in 1749 and took part in the competitions held by the Real Academia de S Fernando, winning second prize in 1769 with the Coronation of Alfonso XI and Queen Mary in the Monastery of Huelgas de Burgos (Madrid, Real Acad. S Fernando, Mus.). In 1760 he won a scholarship to Rome, subsequently winning prizes from the Accademia di S Luca. On his return to Madrid in 1766 he worked as a portrait painter, producing works such as the portrait of Do?a Tomasa de Aliaga, Widow of Salcedo (Madrid, Prado). In 1788 he was elected an honorary member of S Fernando. Under the protection of the Spanish prime minister, Manuel Godoy, Prencipe de la Paz, whom he painted on several occasions , and after painting the portraits of Charles IV and Maria Luisa (both Madrid, Monasterio de la Encarnacien), he was appointed Pintor de Cemara in 1796. In 1798 he applied unsuccessfully for the post of drawing-master to the Prince of Asturias, the future Ferdinand VII, although by 1806 he was teacher of the Infante Princes. He was a refined draughtsman and prepared illustrations for the editions of Cervantes's El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha published by the Real Academia Espa?ola (Madrid, 1780; 1782). He also made the drawings for the handsome engravings (Madrid, Calcografra N.) of the Real Picadero (Royal Riding School). In addition to his portraiture, which displays a talent for realism and wit, although at times combined with slightly garish colours, Carnicero executed attractive and descriptive costumbrista paintings, depicting everyday life, popular gatherings and hunting scenes, for instance Duck Shooting on the Albufera, Valencia
Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer
(12 January 1636 - 20 February 1699) was a Franco-Flemish painter who specialised in flower pieces. He was attached to the Gobelins tapestry workshops and the Beauvais tapestry workshops, too, where he produced cartoons of fruit and flowers for the tapestry-weavers, and at Beauvais was one of three painterswho collaborated to produce cartoons for the suite The Emperor of China. He was born at Lille, but was in Paris by 1650, where he was documented working on the decors of the Hôtel Lambert. He was taken up by Charles Le Brun for decorative painting at the Château de Marly and at the Grand Dauphin's residence, the Château de Meudon. He was received at the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1665 with a piece of the genre that he made his specialty, a still life of flowers and fruit combined with objets d'art. His only appearance at the Paris salon was in 1673.
Chester Harding
painted Self Portrait in 1843