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 :. | simmande ander | Portrait of Zorn | tornseglare | duvhok och orrar | katt pa blommande sommarang |
Related Artists:
William Sharp
British 1749-1824,was an English line-engraver born in London. He was originally apprenticed to what is called a bright engraver, and practised as a writing engraver, but gradually became inspired by the higher branches of the engraver's art. Among his earlier plates are some illustrations, after Stothard, for the Novelists' Magazine. He engraved the "Doctors Disputing on the Immaculateness of the Virgin" and the "Ecce Homo" of Guido Reni, the "St Cecilia" of Domenichino, the "Virgin and Child" of Dolci, and the portrait of John Hunter of Sir Joshua Reynolds. His style of eta-graving is thoroughly masterly and original, excellent in its play of line and rendering of half-tints and of "colour." He died at Chiswick on the 25th of July 1824. In his youth, owing to his hotly expressed adherence to the politics of Paine and Horne Tooke, he was examined by the privy council on a charge of treason. Mesmer and Brothers found in Sharp a stanch believer; and for long he maintained Joanna Southcott at his own expense. As an engraver he achieved a European reputation, and at the time of his death he enjoyed the honour of being a member of the Imperial Academy of Vienna and of the Royal Academy of Munich.
Gabriel Metsu
Gabriël Metsu Gabriël Metsu (January 1629 - buried 24 October 1667) was a Dutch painter of history paintings, genre works and portraits. Metsu was the son of the Flemish painter Jacques Metsu (c.1588-1629), who lived most of his days at Leiden, and Jacomijntje Garniers, his third wife, whom he married in 1625. Jacomijntje was the widow of a painter with three children of her own. Two months after Gabriël's birth, his father died. According to Jacobus Houbraken, Metsu was taught by Gerard Dou, though his early works do not lend colour to this assertion. He was influenced by painters of Leiden such as Jan Steen, and later by Frans van Mieris the Elder. Metsu was registered among the first members of the painters' corporation at Leiden; and the books of the guild also tell us that he remained a member in 1649. In Leiden, it was alleged that Metsu left a brothel at six in the morning and took a prostitute to the Academy. In 1650 he ceased to subscribe, and works bearing his name and the date of 1653 support the belief that he had moved. Metsu was trained in Utrecht by Jan Baptist Weenix and Nicolaus Knepfer. In Amsterdam Metsu lived in an alley on Prinsengracht, where he kept chickens. He got into an argument with a neighbor and moved to a house on the canal side, where a daily vegetable market was held. In 1658 he married Isabella de Wolff, whose father was a potter and mother a painter. The Speed Art Museum has a portrait of the couple. Pieter de Grebber, a religious painter from Haarlem, was her uncle. At the onset of the 1660s Metsu turned for inspiration to the art of the "fijnschilders" from his native Leiden. Metsu was responding to the market of Dou's paintings, who sold his paintings all over for exorbitant prices. Metsu may have also influenced Pieter de Hoogh. Around the year 1661, Metsu won the patronage of the Amsterdam cloth merchant Jan J. Hinlopen and painted his family more than once in a fashionable surrounding. The Poultry-Seller, 1662 At least thirteen of paintings show carpets and he probably used the same model. He included several fine examples of minutely depicted floral and cloudband carpets in his works and even a silk Oriental rug, as well as so-called "Lotto" rugs which he for some reason, in contrast to his meticulous rendering of the floral carpets, depicted only in a very sketchy fashion. After Metsu died, his widow left for Enkhuizen, to live with her mother.
Polk, Charles Peale
American, 1767-1822 American painter. Orphaned as a child, he was raised in Philadelphia, PA, by his uncle, Charles Willson Peale, who taught him to paint. In 1791 Polk moved to Baltimore, MD, where he achieved limited success as a portrait painter. Seeking commissions, he moved to Frederick, MD, in 1796. Over the next five years during travels as an itinerant limner through western Maryland and Virginia he reached his mature style. Abandoning his academic training, Polk developed a distinctive but naive artistic vocabulary with a heightened palette, electric highlights and an exaggerated attenuation of the human form. The portraits of Isaac Hite and his wife Eleanor Madison Hite, as well as James Madison sr and Eleanor Conway Madison (all Middletown, VA, Belle Grove), were commissioned in 1799 and are accepted as his masterpieces. Isaac Hite also commissioned the quintessentially 'republican' portrait of Thomas Jefferson (New York, Victor Spark priv. col.), executed at Monticello in 1799. In 1801 Polk moved to Washington, DC, working as a clerk in the Treasury. During the next 16 years he painted few portraits in oil