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 :. | strackande svanar | grunt vatten | sangtrasten | vinterlandskap med domherrar | harspar |
Related Artists:
Henri-Edmond Cross
(May 20, 1856 - May 16, 1910) was a French pointillist painter. Cross was born in Douai and grew up in Lille. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts. His early works, portraits and still lifes, were in the dark colors of realism, but after meeting with Claude Monet in 1883, he painted in the brighter colors of Impressionism. In 1884, Cross co-founded the Societe des Artistes Independants with Georges Seurat. He went on to become one of the principal exponents of Neo-Impressionism. He began his Pointillist period after spending time with Paul Signac in 1904. His later works are Fauvist, perhaps influenced by his acquaintance with Henri Matisse. His final years, plagued by rheumatism, were spent in Saint-Clair[disambiguation needed ], where he died in 1910. His pieces include The Church of Santa Maria degli Angely Near Assisi (1909) and Landscape with Stars. The Allen Memorial Art Museum (Oberlin College, Ohio), the Block Museum of Art (Northwestern University, Illinois), The Art Institute of Chicago, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Harvard University Art Museums, the Hermitage Museum, the Honolulu Academy of Arts, Kröller-Meller Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Grenoble (Grenoble, France), Musee d'Orsay (Paris), Musee Malraux (Le Havre, France), Musee Richard Anacreon (Granville, France), the Museum of Modern Art (New York City), the National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.), New Art Gallery (Walsall, England), the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum (Madrid), are among the public collections holding works by Henri-Edmond Cross.
fredrika bremer
was a Swedish writer and a feminist activist. Fredrika Bremer was born in Åbo (Turku) in Finland but moved with her family to Stockholm when she was three years old. She grew up in Stockholm and in the manor Årsta outside Stockholm. Her father was described as somewhat of a house tyrant, and her mother was a socialite, and she and her sisters where brought up to marry in to the aristocracy; a trip on the continent 1821-1822 was the finishing touch of her upbringing before her debute. Bremer was not comfortable with this role, and was inflicted by a crisis, which she overcame by charitable work in the country around Årsta. In 1828, she debuted as a writer, anonomously, with a series of novels published until 1831, and was soon followed by others. Her novels were romantic stories of the time and concentrates on women in the marriage market; either beautiful and superficial, or unattractive with no hope of joining it, and the person telling the story and watching them is often an independent woman. She wanted a new kind of family life, not focused only on the men of the family, that would allow for women to develop their own talents and personality. By the 1840s, she was an acknowledged part of the culture life in Sweden and was translated to many languages. Politically, she was a liberal, but also felt symphaty for the socialism of the English working class movement
Ventura Salimbeni
(also later called Bevilacqua; 20 January 1568 - 1613) was an Italian Mannerist painter and printmaker and among the last representatives of a style influenced by the earlier Sienese School of Quattrocento-Renaissance. Salimbeni was born in Siena. He studied painting, together with his half-brother Francesco Vanni, under their father Arcangelo Salimbeni in his native Siena, He possibly spent some time,in Northern Italy and then moved to Rome in 1588 to work, together with others, on the fresco painting of the Vatican Library under pope Sixtus V. During 1590-1591, he got a commission by Cardinal Bonifazio Bevilacqua Aldobrandini for paintings in the Roman Jesuit Church of the Gese and the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore. These paintings show the influence of the Mannerist Cavalier D'Arpino and Andrea Lillio. Salimbeni returned to Siena in 1595. Here he became one of the last leaders of the Mannerist school, in this period between Mannerism and Baroque. He was here influenced by Federico Barocci as can be seen in the draperies, highlighted with abrupt changes of light and flickering surfaces, of his painting "Birth of a Virgin" in the San Domenico church in Ferrara (1607-1608). He completed painting cycles (1595-1602) for Sienese churches such as the oratory in the Santa Trinite. He is known for detailed preparatory drawings, most of which are now in the Uffizi in Florence or the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. He started around 1600 painting the scenes from the "Life of St. Hyacinth" for the Sienese church of Santo Spirito. These paintings show the awkward perspective of the style of the Sienese Mannerist painter Beccafumi in the backdrop of buildings and landscape. In Siena, Salimbeni completed several painting cycles for the church of Santo Spirito. He continued to create paintings for churches throughout Italy, including Florence. At the Basilica della Santissima Annunziata di Firenze, he frescoed lunettes (1605-1608) illustrating events in the history of the Servite Order. In the Duomo di San Salvatore, he executed a magnificent John the Baptist. At about the same time, around 1600, he got an assignment in Assisi for a fresco of the "Resurrection of Christ" and the "Dying Saint Clare is visited by the pope" in the vault of chapel of San Massimo in the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli. Salimbeni got in 1603 the commission to paint frescoes with scenes from the church's patron saints in the church of Quirico and Giulitta, one of the oldest churches in Siena. As in the church of Santa Trinite, he worked here alongside with the painter Alessandro Casolari. This was a period on non-stop new assignments : three paintings for the church San Lorenzo in San Pietro in Montalcino, the "Donation of the Keys" (1599), the "Disputa of the Eucharist" (1600) and the "Crucifixion" (1604). At the same time he was painting the "Vision of Gregory the great" and the "Punishment of David" in the Basilica of San Pietro in Perugia. The papal legate, cardinal Bonifazio Bevilacqua (1571-1627), who had commissioned these paintings, was so pleased that he invested Ventura Salimbeni with the Order of the Golden Spur, a very selective papal order. He was even authorized from now on to name himself Cavalieri Bevilacqua. He painted the canvas of the Ascension of the Virgin (1607) for San Frediano in Pisa. In 1612 he painted the "Life of Saint Galganus" for the Chiesa del Santuccio in Siena with the hermit saint set in a wooded landscape. His last work of art was the oil painting the "Marriage of the Virgin" for the Seminario diocesano in Foligno in 1613.