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 :. | terrangstudie | Trutar vid strandkanten | afton ,vildander | svanar i bris | rapphons med prastkragar |
Related Artists:
Jean Ranc
French portraits painter, 1674-1735 French painter, active also in Spain. His father was the painter Antoine Ranc (1634-1716), under whom he must have trained. From 1697 he lived in Paris, where he continued his apprenticeship in Hyacinthe Rigaud's studio. After working for some years as Rigaud's assistant, he joined the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris in 1703 and reached the rank of academician as a portrait painter in 1707. As Rigaud's protege he worked for the French court, painting portraits of Louis XV (1718; Versailles, Cheteau) and almost certainly other members of the royal family as well as of the aristocracy. He also painted some allegorical and mythological works, such as Vertumnus and Pomona
Hans Olaf Heyerdahl
Swedish, 1857-1913 Norwegian painter. He was born into an enlightened but conservative family, his father being an engineer, occasional architect and writer of Nordic saga poetry, and he spent his childhood and youth in the rapidly expanding town of Drammen, 40 km from the capital Christiania. In 1873 he was admitted to the Kongelige Tegneskole in Christiania, where he studied under Peder C. Thurmann, a landscape artist trained in Desseldorf. For more advanced training, Heyerdahl was obliged to go abroad, and in 1874 he enrolled at the Munich Akademie. He was encouraged by Professor Ludwig von Lefftz (1845-1910) to give up landscape in favour of history painting and portraits (e.g. the artists Christian Skredsvig, 1876, and Eilif Peterssen, 1877; both Oslo, N.G.). In 1877, under the guidance of Professor Wilhelm Lindenschmit (1829-95), Heyerdahl finished his most inventive and brilliant composition, the Expulsion from the Garden (Oslo, N.G.). Using over life-size figures, set in a barren tempestuous landscape, Heyerdahl skilfully contrasted the youthful rage of Adam with the resigned despair of Eve. This sombre work won him a third prize medal at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1878.
Alfred de breanski
1852-1928