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 :. | ovan | upplandskt djurliv | upplandskt landskap | Eiders at Sunrise | tornseglare |
Related Artists:
Wilhelmina Lagerholm
1826-1917 Konstakademien Lagerholm studerade samtidigt med Malmström såväl vid konstakademien i stockholm som för couture i paris.
LIPPI, Fra Filippo
Italian Early Renaissance Painter, ca.1406-1469 Filippo Lippi was born in Florence. He took his vows in 1421 in the monastery S. Maria del Carmine, where Masaccio frescoed the Brancacci Chapel in the church (1426-1427). By 1430 Lippi is mentioned in church documents as "painter." Masaccio's influence, as well as Donatello's, can be seen in Lippi's early works, such as the Tarquinia Madonna of 1437 (National Gallery, Rome) and the Annunciation (S. Lorenzo, Florence) and Barbadori Altar (Louvre, Paris), both begun in 1437/1438. However, the severity of Masaccio and Donatello was mitigated by Lippi, who was instrumental in salvaging from the Gothic past the lyrical expressiveness of a linear mode which Masaccio had all but given up for modeling in chiaroscuro. Toward the middle of the 15th century Lippi's pictures became more finely articulated and his surface design more complex. It is probable that he had a large workshop, and the hand of assistants may be observed in the important fresco decoration started in 1452 in the choir chapel of the Prato Cathedral. After delays and strong protests this commission was finally completed in 1466. The cycle, a highly important monument of Early Renaissance painting, demonstrates Lippi's increasingly more mature style, revealing him to be witty, original, and well versed in all the artistic accomplishments of his time, to which he himself contributed. Through linear perspective Lippi was able to render a convincing illusion of recession and plausible three-dimensional figures. He knew how to express emotions, and he was a keen observer of nature. Lippi painted astonishing portrait likenesses and combined figures and space with an animated surface rhythm, the best example of which can be seen in the Feast of Herod, one of the last scenes in the Prato cycle. During his stay at Prato he was the cause of a scandal (later resolved by papal indulgence): he ran off with a nun, Lucrezia Buti, who bore him two children, one of whom, Filippino Lippi (ca. 1457-1504), was also a painter. In the Prato frescoes as well as in his contemporary panel pictures, such as the Madonna with Two Angels (Uffizi Gallery, Florence), or in the exquisite tondo of the Madonna (Pitti Palace, Florence), Filippo Lippi anticipated later developments in 15th-century painting. In these pictures are to be found the sources of Sandro Botticelli, Lippi's most illustrious pupil. Lippi's innovations extended also to iconography. In his quest for realism he introduced the "bourgeoise" Madonna: the type of contemporary Florentine lady elegantly dressed in the fashion of the time with the hair on her forehead plucked to stress the height of it. He also introduced the subject of the Madonna adoring the Child in the woods (Museum of Berlin, and Uffizi, Florence).
Nicolae Vermont
(October 10, 1866 - June 14, 1932) was a Romanian realist painter, graphic artist and muralist. He was noted for his wide range of subjects and his interest in social issues, and was an associate of the post-Impressionists Ştefan Luchian and Constantin Artachino, as well as a friend of the controversial art collector and political figure Alexandru Bogdan-Piteşti. Born in Bacău, Vermont belonged to the Jewish community. Late in his life, Vermont abandoned Judaism and converted to the Romanian Orthodox Church. He began his career in 1884, as a contributor to the journal Universul, while studying with Theodor Aman at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bucharest (graduated 1886). Vermont completed his training at the Munich Akademie der Bildenden Kenste (1893). He was able to attend the latter institution after being endorsed by the major Romanian artist Nicolae Grigorescu.