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 :. | tornfalk vid boet med ungar | Hooded Crows | Portrait of Father | Vinterhare vid gardesgard | taltrast vid boet |
Related Artists:
Jan Kupecky
(in German: Johann Kupetzky, in Hungarian: Kupecky Jenos, or Kupeczky Jenos, 1667, Bazin, Royal Hungary (today Slovakia) - 1740, Nernberg, Germany) was a Czech and Slovak portrait painter during the baroque. He was active in Hungary, Slovakia, Vienna and Nernberg. Kupecký, like many people at that time, was the son of Protestant (Czech Brethren) parents from the Czech lands (Mlade Boleslav) who sought refuge in Slovakia (constituting the core of Royal Hungary at that time) from religious persecution by the Catholics. He was born in Pezinok - a town near Bratislava. According to the sources he began his studies with the Swiss painter Benedikt Klaus, who was active in both Vienna and in Royal Hungary. At the age of twenty, Kupecký went on a long Italian study trip. In Rome Prince Aleksander Benedykt Sobieski, the son of the Polish king John III Sobieski, helped him to become famous. He returned to Vienna in 1709, after twenty-two years spent in Venice and Rome. We know very little of his Italian activity as well as his early works and his setting in Vienna. According to his contemporary biographer, the Swiss Johann Caspar Fessli, the Protestant Kupecký, who faithfully clung to his ancestor's religion, remained withdrawn and isolated in Vienna's Catholic milieu, which was under the influence of the court and the aristocracy. However this concept is partly contradicted by the fact that the master had significant courtly commissions while working in Vienna. He painted portraits of various members of the dynasty, Prince Eugene of Savoy, several aristocrats, and, in Karlovy Vary, even of the Russian Czar Peter I. The rich ceuvre of this period comprises a series of gorgeous portraits of Kupecky's family, friends and the painter himself, as well as several persons, whose identity in unknown. In 1733 Kupecký, fearing religious persecution, fled from Vienna to Nernberg with his family and worked there until his death in 1740. As the most significant portrait painter of contemporary Germany, he was commissioned by a large number of German princes, church dignitaries rich merchants and scholars, and his works were popularized by engravings even during his lifetime. Through his pupils and followers Kupecký's influence and artistic example remained alive and widespread for a long time.
Cordelia Creigh Wilson
(28 November 1873, Georgetown, Colorado - 7 June 1953, Seattle, Washington) was a painter noted for her landscapes of New Mexico and the American Southwest. Cordelia "Cordie" Creigh was born in Clear Creek County, Colorado. Her father died in her early childhood, and she was raised by her mother, Emma Creigh who shuttled the family between Winfield, Kansas and Colorado. She married Willard Wilkinson in Boulder, Colorado in 1897 and gave birth to her only child, Louise, in Hayden the next year, however, the couple divorced shortly after the turn of the century. Cordelia then began to seriously develop her skills as an artist motivated by latest trends in American realism led by Robert Henri. Her academic training emphasized development of an alla prima technique and painting out of doors, which inspired her to produce bold impasto works quickly. She started making road trips to New Mexico and became friends with painters in the Taos Society of Artists and the Santa Fe art colony. Her numerous expressive oil sketches and en plein air canvases of adobe dwellings and rugged landscapes caught the attention of art dealers. Before the end of the First World War, Cordelia married John H. Wilson and took his surname for her entire professional career. They settled on Tremont Street in Denver, just around the corner from the J. Gibson Smith Gallery which displayed and sold her works. Many of her paintings had frames she hand-carved in rustic Arts and Crafts style and gilded with sheets of gold leaf. In 1917, Cordelia Wilson was honored by having two paintings selected for the inaugural exhibition of the new New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe. The show featured easel works by George Bellows, Robert Henri, F. Martin Hennings, and Leon Kroll, who were working in the Southwest at that time, along with the "Taos Six" (Oscar Berninghaus, Ernest Blumenschein, Irving Couse, Herbert Dunton, Bert Geer Phillips, and Joseph Henry Sharp) and other members of the Taos Society. One of her paintings exhibited in the show, A Mexican Home, was reproduced in the January CFebruary 1918 issue of the journal Art and Archaeology (published by the Archaeological Institute of America) that featured a cover article about the museum's opening. Among Cordelia Wilson's largest landscapes is a 50" x 70" canvas, created for World War I military training. It was exhibited at the School of American Research of Santa Fe in 1917 with other large-scale so-called "Range Finder" paintings by Blumenschein, Berninghaus, Phillips, Gustave Baumann, Walter Ufer, Leon Gaspard, and others. They had been commissioned by the U.S. Army based on a proposal by the Salmagundi Club of New York, whose members wanted to make a special contribution to America's war effort. When the show closed, the works on display were shipped to Camp Funston at Fort Riley, Kansas and Camp Cody at Deming, New Mexico. The paintings were used for indoor instruction in range finding, topographical quizzes, and map drawing at Army camps. John Wilson, her husband, contracted tuberculosis in about 1921. The couple moved to the Seattle for his treatment at a sanitorium, where he passed away the following year. In 1923, Cordelia married for a third time to John N. Fahnestock, but this marriage ended in divorce in 1928. Cordelia continued to reside in Pacific Northwest producing still lifes, florals, and scenes of the Puget Sound region, although she periodically traveled, worked, and displayed her art in the Southwest.
fritz von dardel
Fritz Ludvig von Dardel, född den 24 mars 1817 i Neuchâtel, död den 27 maj 1901 i Stockholm, var en schweiziskfödd svensk överintendent, militär, målare och tecknare. Fritz von Dardel var son till godsägaren Georges-Alexandre von Dardel och grevinnan Hedvig Sofia Charlotta Amalia Lewenhaupt. Han var gift med friherrinnan Augusta Silfverschiöld. Släkten von Dardel kommer från Schweiz och adlades i Sverige 1810. Von Dardel blev vid sexton års ålder konstapelkadett vid Vendes artilleriregemente, 1837 underlöjtnant vid Svea livgarde och avancerade till överstelöjtnant i armen 1862. Han blev 1850 adjutant hos kronprinsen och sedan hos Karl XV. Von Dardel var 1858-62 militärattach?? i Paris samt blev 1864 kabinettskammarherre hos Karl XV och samma år överintendent och ordföranden i Akademin för de fria konsterna, av vilken han 1861 invalts till hedersledamot. Dessutom var han ordförande i Nationalmuseums nämnd i 25 år (1867-92). Vid flera konstutställningar i Europa (1867, 1871, 1873 och 1878) samt i Philadelphia (1876) var han juryman. Själv hade von Dardel bedrivit studier på L??on Cogniets och E. Lamis ateljeer i Paris. Fritz von Dardel tillhörde Karl XV:s intima krets och har gjort ett flertal dråpliga, akvarellerade teckningar av personer och händelser vid hovet eller under kungens resor, vidare folklivsbilder samt litografier. Hans dagböcker (se nedan) som utgavs postumt är skrivna på franska och översatta och redigerade av hans söner.