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 :. | frisk bris | kungsorn och hare | pilgrimsfalk och grasander | tryckande hare | Grasander |
Related Artists:
Auguste Alexandre Hirsch
1833-1912
Constance Mayer
Marie-Françoise-Constance Mayer-Lamartiniere French Neoclassical Painter, 1775-1821
Thomas Dewing
(May 4, 1851 C November 5, 1938) was an American painter working at the turn of the 20th century. He was born in Newton Lower Falls, Massachusetts. He studied at the Acad??mie Julian in Paris, and later settled into a studio in New York City. He married Maria Oakey Dewing, an accomplished painter with extensive formal art training and familial links with the art world. He is best known for his tonalist paintings, a sub-genre of American art that was rooted in English Aestheticism. Dewing's preferred vehicle of artistic expression is the female figure. Often seated playing instruments, writing letters, or engaged in other impassive actions and situated in gauzy, dreamy interiors, the figures remain remote and distant to the viewer. These scenes are infused with a color that pervades the entire picture, setting tone and mood. The ethereal delicacy and subtle color harmonies of Dewing's paintings have not met with universal approval: some feminist critics have lambasted Dewing's work as being misogynistic; he rarely painted anything other than the female figure, vacant of expression, languishing in sumptuous clothing. Tonalism quickly came to be considered outdated with the advent of modernism and abstraction in art, though Dewing was successful in his own day. His art was considered extremely elegant, and has undergone a subtle revival in the last 10 years or so. Dewing was a member of the Ten American Painters, a group of American Impressionists who seceded from the Society of American Artists in 1897.