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 :. | rav som lurar pa ander | Portrait of Father | strackande alfagelflock | Vinterhare vid gardesgard | ang med snappor |
Related Artists:
Gabriel Metsu
1629-1667 Dutch Gabriel Metsu Galleries One of his earliest pictures is the "Lazarus" at the Strassburg Museum, painted under the influence of Jan Steen. In 1653 under the influence of Rembrandt he painted "Woman taken in Adultery," a large picture which is now in the Louvre. To the same period belong the "Departure of Hagar," formerly in the Thore collection, and the "Widow's Mite" at the Schwerin Gallery. But he probably observed that sacred art was ill suited to his temper, or he found the field too strongly occupied, and turned to other subjects for which he was better fitted. That at one time he was deeply impressed by the vivacity and bold technique of Frans Hals can be gathered from Lord Lonsdale's picture of "Women at a Fishmonger's Shop." What Metsu undertook and carried out from the first with surprising success was the low life of the market and tavern, contrasted, with wonderful versatility, by incidents of high life and the drawing-room. In no single instance do the artistic lessons of Rembrandt appear to have been lost upon him. The same principles of light and shade which had marked his schoolwork in the "Woman taken in Adultery" were applied to subjects of quite a different kind. A group in a drawing-room, a series of groups in the market-place, or a single figure in the gloom of a tavern or parlour, was treated with the utmost felicity by fit concentration and gradation of light, a warm flush of tone pervading every part, and, with that, the study of texture in stuffs was carried as far as it had been by Ter Borch or Gerard Dou, if not with the finish or the brio of De Hooch. One of the best pictures of Metsu's manhood is the "Market-place of Amsterdam," at the Louvre, respecting which it is difficult to distribute praise in fair proportions, so excellent are the various parts, the characteristic movement and action of the dramatis personae, the selection of faces, the expression and the gesture, and the texture of the things depicted. Equally fine, though earlier, are the "Sportsman" (dated 1661) and the "Tavern" (also 1661) at the Hague and Dresden Museums, and the "Game-Dealer's Shop," also at Dresden, with the painter's signature and 1662. Gabriel Metsu, Man Writing a Letter (1662-1665), Oil on canvas, National Gallery of Ireland, DublinAmong the five examples of the painter in the Wallace Collection, are "The Tabby Cat," and "The Sleeping Sportsman," which cost Lord Hertford £ 3000, is an admirable example technically considered. Among his finest representations of home life are the "Repast" at the Hermitage in St Petersburg; the "Mother nursing her Sick Child" in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam; the "Amateur Musicians" at the Hague Gallery; the "Duet" and the "Music Lesson" at the National Gallery, London, and many more examples at nearly all the leading European galleries. Five of his painting are in Dresden, collected by August the Strong.
oscar bjorck
född 15 januari 1860 i Stockholm, död av en hjärtattack i sitt hem klockan 03.00 den 5 december 1929, var en svensk konstnär och professor vid Konsthögskolan 1898-1925, och från 1918 även vice preses. Åren 1877-1882 var han elev till Edvard Pers??us vid konstakademins principskola och målade bland annat prisämnena Loke fängslas af asarne (1880), Gustaf Vasa inför kung Hans (1881) och Den förlorade sonens återkomst (1882, belönad med kungliga medaljen). 1883 fick Björck akademiskt resestipendium och vistades vintern 1883?C84 i Paris. Vintern 1884?C85 reste Björck till M??nchen, målade några porträtt, bland annat ett i helfigur av sin hustru. Våren 1885 flyttade han till Venezia och på hösten till Rom. Där målade han den stora modelltavlan Susanna (Göteborgs museum) och Romerska smeder (galleriet i Washington, en skiss till samma tavla finns i Göteborgs museum). 1887 målades i Venezia Veneziansk saluhall (nationalmuseum), Lördagsmässa i Markuskyrkan och andra tavlor. Efter en sommarvistelse på Skagen, där han förut tillbringat två somrar, 1882 och 1884, bosatte sig Björck 1888 i Stockholm. Han har sedan huvudsakligast målat porträtt. Bland dessa kan nämnas flera av konung Oscar (bland dem ett på Skokloster, ett i helfigur på Drottningholm, ett med krona och mantel, på Stockholms slott, ett som övergick i tyske kejsarens ägo), prins Eugen vid staffliet (nationalmuseum, 1895), kronprins Gustaf (Stockholms slott, 1900), konstnärens hustru (helfigur, 1891, Göteborgs museum) och friherre Nordenfalk (konstakademien, 1892). Dessutom skapade han några landskap, ett par genrebilder och olika dekorativa målningar. Från 1889 var han ledamot vid konstakademin och lärare vid Konsthögskolan. 1898 blev han professor. Björck var kommissarie för konstavdelningen vid Stockholmsutställningen 1897 och vid Baltiska utställningen 1914 samt för den svenska utställningen i London 1924.
MENGS, Anton Raphael
German Neoclassical Painter, 1728-1779 Painter and writer, brother of Theresia Concordia Mengs. His early career was at the Dresden court; thereafter he worked principally in Rome and Madrid, notably on the frescoes at the Villa Albani and the Palacio Real respectively. As an early exponent of Neo-classicism he produced some impressive classical and religious scenes, though he was most accomplished as a portrait painter. Under the influence of Johann Joachim Winckelmann he also wrote some theoretical works, of which the most important is the Gedanken ber die Schenheit und ber den Geschmack in der Malerey (1762). Although acclaimed during his lifetime