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 :. | solnedgang | vattenlandskap | enbuskar | tjaderhona | fyra jagande hundar isho |
Related Artists:
PANTOJA DE LA CRUZ, Juan
Spanish Painter, 1553-1608 Spanish painter. He must have moved to Madrid when he was very young, receiving his training in the workshop of Alonso S?nchez Coello, painter to Philip II. On numerous occasions he declared himself to be a follower of S?nchez Coello, in whose workshop he was an oficial, and he probably collaborated to a considerable degree on many of his master's mature works. There are very few signed works by Pantoja from before the death of S?nchez Coello, although some anonymous paintings from the workshop are probably by him. In Madrid in 1587 Pantoja married a woman of some means, and by the following year, when S?nchez Coello died, he was an independent painter, aspiring to his master's position. Documentation exists from 1590 concerning portraits by Pantoja of members of the royal family including one of Don Felipe, the future Philip III (1593; Vienna, Ksthist. Mus.). On Philip's accession to the throne in 1598 Pantoja painted another portrait of him (Vienna, Ksthist. Mus.) and became the official portrait painter for the court and for the nobility of Madrid; there is detailed documentation for his work from this time. He painted clothing and jewels with precision, in minute detail and with a dry objectivity in the Flemish tradition. His treatment of faces, however, clearly reveals his study of Venetian portraiture, and in particular that of Titian, as well as sharp psychological penetration. In his portraits of royal children he maintained, albeit with a certain rigidity, the charm that S?nchez Coello in his paintings had given these infant figures tightly swathed in official robes
saint tropez
1892-1900
Sir William Beechey
1753-1839 British English painter. He was trained as a lawyer before entering the Royal Academy Schools, London, in 1772. He is thought to have studied under Johan Zoffany, and his earliest surviving portraits are small-scale full-lengths and conversation pieces in Zoffanys manner (e.g. The Custance Conversation Piece, c. 1786; priv. col.). Beechey first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1776. In 1782 he moved to Norwich, where he gained several commissions, but he was back in London by 1787. In 1789 he exhibited a portrait of John Douglas, Bishop of Carlisle (London, Lambeth Pal.) that is remarkable for its facility of handling. Beechey would occasionally paint similarly inspired works, but his career is marked by a succession of unflamboyant but competent portraits in the tradition of Joshua Reynolds.