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 :. | Ejdrar pa kobbe | rapphons | upplandskt djurliv | orn jagande hare | sangtrasten |
Related Artists:
Edward Robert Hughes
British 1851-1917 Edward Robert Hughes (1851-1917) is a well known English painter who worked in a style influenced by Pre-Raphaelitism and Aestheticism. Some of his best known works are Midsummer Eve and Night With Her Train of Stars. Hughes was the nephew of Arthur Hughes. He often used watercolour/gouache. He was elected ARWS in 1891 and chose as his diploma work for election to full membership a mystical piece inspired by a verse by Christina Rossetti's "Amor Mundi". Technically Hughes experimented with ambitious techniques. He was a perfectionist who did numerous studies which in their own right turned out to be good enough for exhibition He was also an assistant to the elderly William Holman Hunt. He helped the increasingly infirm Hunt with the version of The Light of the World now in St. Paul's Cathedral and with The Lady of Shalott. He died on April 23 1914 at his cottage in St. Albans, Hertfordshire.
Francis Day
Francis Day CIE (1829-1889) was Inspector-General of Fisheries in India(from circa 1871) and Burma and an ichthyologist. He was born on the 2nd of March 1829 Maresfield, Sussex, UK third son of William and Ann Day. He became the medical officer in the Madras Presidency, East India Company services in 1852. Francis Day was created a Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire in 1885. He was decorated with the 0rder of the crown of Italy. He retired in 1877. He wrote a monograph on fishes between 1875-1878 "The Fishes of India" with a supplement in 1888 and two volumes on "Fishes" in the Fauna of British India series in which he described over 1400 species. Also wrote British and Irish Salmonadae, which he illustrated with 9 plates, the colouring of which was done by Miss Florence Woolward. Francis Day was granted an honary LLD by the University of Edinburgh. Also Published Fishes of Malabar in 1865 Franics Day was an active member, and president of the Cheltenham Natural Sciences Society and presented papers to them. Also was an active member of the Cotswold Field Club, where he was vice president. He died at his residence, Kenilworth House, Cheltenham on the 10th of July 1889 of cancer of the stomach. Buried in Cheltenham cemetery.
Carl Bille
painted Shipping off the Norwegian Coast in 1889