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 :. | Svanar vid strandkanten | beckasin i vatmark | Rav i skogsparti | Partridge with Daisies | blomvass |
Related Artists:
Jan Stanislawski
(June 24, 1860, Olshana near Korsun - January 6, 1907, Krakew) was a Polish modernist painter, art professor, originator and member of various art groups and societies. Initially, he studied mathematics at Warsaw University (1879 - 1882), and subsequently at the Imperial Technical Institute in St Petersburg. He began to learn painting in the so called Drawing Class (which later gave rise to the School of Fine Arts) in Warsaw under Wojciech Gerson. In 1883, he enrolled in the School of Fine Arts in Krakew. In 1885, he continued his studies in Paris under Charles Emile Auguste Durand. While based in Paris, he travelled much, visiting Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, and also Ukraine. His early works were exhibited at the inauguration of the Salon du Champ-de-Mars in Paris in 1890 and at the Friends of the Arts Society in Krakew in 1892. In the 1890s, he travelled extensively and his sketchbooks filled up with drawings from Berlin, Dresden, Prague, Krakew, and various places in Ukraine. Together with Julian Fałat, he painted the landscape parts of Napoleones Army Crossing the Berezina, a panorama by Wojciech Kossak. In 1897, he initiated and helped organise the Separate Exhibition of Pictures and Sculptures at Krakewes Cloth Hall. That year, he become a teacher of landscape painting at the School of Fine Arts in Krakew, and in 1906 - after the school was upgraded to an academy in 1900 - was granted full professorship and also taught at Teodor Axentowiczes Private School of Painting and Drawing for Women and at Teofila Certowiczes Art School for Women in Krakew. He co-founded the "Sztuka" ("Art") Society of Polish Artists in Krakew in 1897. Later he became Deputy Chairman and finally Chairman of that society, and showed his works at numerous exhibitions organised by it. In 1898, he became a member of the Viennese Secession, and his works were exhibited among theirs in 1901, 1902 and 1905. In 1901, he became a founding member of the Polish Applied Arts Society. He worked in the Wawel Castle Reconstruction Committee and was involved in the activities of the Green Balloon (Zielony Balonik) Cabaret. After his death, two exhibitions were opened at the Palace of Art in Krakew in November 1907, one to show 154 of his oil paintings, as well as drawings and watercolours, and the other to present the works of his numerous outstanding students.
Piet Mondrian
Dutch 1872-1944 Piet Mondrian Location was a Dutch painter. He was an important contributor to the De Stijl art movement and group, which was founded by Theo van Doesburg. He evolved a non-representational form which he termed Neo-Plasticism. This consisted of a grid of vertical and horizontal black lines and the use of the three primary colours. When 47-year-old Piet Mondrian left his artistically conservative native Holland for unfettered Paris for the second and last time in 1919, he set about at once to make his studio a nurturing environment for paintings he had in mind that would increasingly express the principles of Neo-Plasticism about which he had been writing for two years. To hide the studio's structural flaws quickly and inexpensively, he tacked up large rectangular placards, each in a single color or neutral hue. Smaller colored paper squares and rectangles, composed together, accented the walls. Then came an intense period of painting. Then again he addressed the walls, repositioning the colored cutouts, adding to their number, altering the dynamics of color and space, producing new tensions and equilibrium. Before long, he had established a creative schedule in which a period of painting took turns with a period of experimentally regrouping the smaller papers on the walls, a process that directly fed the next period of painting. It was a pattern he followed for the rest of his life, through wartime moves from Paris to London??s Hampstead in 1938 and 1940, across the Atlantic to Manhattan. At 71 in the fall of 1943, Mondrian moved into his second and final New York studio at 15 East 59th Street, and set about again to create the environment he had learned over the years was most congenial to his modest way of life and most stimulating to his art. He painted the high walls the same off-white he used on his easel and on the seats, tables and storage cases he designed and fashioned meticulously from discarded orange and apple-crates. He glossed the top of a white metal stool in the same brilliant primary red he applied to the cardboard sheath he made for the radio-phonograph that spilled forth his beloved jazz from well-traveled records, Visitors to this last studio seldom saw more than one or two new canvases, but found, often to their astonishment, that eight large compositions of colored bits of paper he had tacked and re-tacked to the walls in ever-changing relationships constituted together an environment that, paradoxically and simultaneously, was both kinetic and serene, stimulating and restful. It was the best space, Mondrian said, that he had ever inhabited. Tragically, he was there for only a few months: he died of pneumonia in February 1944.
Girolamo Genga
Italian Painter and Architect , 1476-ca.1551 was an Italian painter and architect of the late Renaissance, Mannerist Genga was born near Urbino. According mainly to Giorgio Vasari's biography, by age thirteen Genga had gained an apprenticeship in Orvieto under Luca Signorelli. He was afterwards for three years with Pietro Perugino, in company with Raphael. He next worked in Florence and Siena (where he decorated the Petrucci palace c. 1508), along with Timoteo della Vite; and in the latter city he painted various compositions for Pandolfo Petrucci, a leading local statesman. Returning to Urbino, he was employed by Duke Guidobaldo da Montefeltro in the decorations of his palace, and showed extraordinary aptitude for theatrical adornments. He is recorded as having help design the decorations for the Duke's funeral in 1508. From Urbino, he went to Rome and painted church of Santa Caterina da Siena one of his masterpieces: The Resurrection. Francesco Maria I della Rovere, duke of Urbino, recalled Genga, and commissioned him to execute works in connection with his marriage to Eleonora Gonzaga in 1522. This prince being soon afterwards expelled by Pope Leo X, Genga followed him to Mantua, whence he went for a time to Pesaro. The duke of Urbino was eventually restored to his dominions; he took Genga with him, and appointed him the ducal architect and decorator. He worked extensively on the Villa Imperiale on Mount Accio . Among his work in Urbino, was the scenography of plays,