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 :. | aftonlandskap | blomvass | afton ,vildander | landskapsstudie | fallande vildgass |
Related Artists:
Herbert William Weekes
Herbert William Weekes (fl. 1864 - 1904) was a well-known British genre and animal painter of the Victorian Neoclassical period who specialized in portraying animals in humorous, human-like situations. Weekes was born ca. 1842 in Pimlico, London, England to a prominent artistic family: the youngest of five children, his father, Henry Weekes, Sr. (1807 - 1877), was a sculptor and Royal Academician; his brother, Henry, Jr. (fl. 1850 - 1884), was also a genre painter known for his animal studies; and his brother, Frederick (1833 - 1920), was an artist and expert on medieval costume and design. Weekes appears to have used his middle name, William, for all but formal purposes. He lived and worked for most of his life in London, at 21 Oppidans Road, Primrose Hill. In 1865, he married Caroline Anne Henshaw (born ca. 1844), of Hammersmith. "Suspicion (ca. 1900)", oil-on-canvas "Fowl Talk", oil-on-canvas Weekes' signatureKnown as an animal and genre painter of the Victorian Neoclassical style, Weekes' work was popular, and helped expand 19th century animal painting from its traditional role of simply recording beasts into a way of reflecting human life. He frequently personified animals and placed them in situations particular to humans. His work shows a sensitive understanding of his subject matter, and part of his success in capturing the peaceful country atmosphere depicted in so many of his paintings lay in his affection for it. He was greatly influenced by one of the foremost animal painters of the nineteenth century, Sir Edwin Henry Landseer. Weekes contributed illustrations for The Illustrated London News in 1883, and exhibited extensively in various London and provincial galleries. His works were well received - although not by everyone: a contemporary wit described his paintings as eWeekes' Weak Squeakse.
Georg Friedrich Kersting
1785-1847 German Georg Friedrich Kersting Gallery Kersting was a friend of Caspar David Friedrich, the leading German Romantic painter; his style was influenced by Friedrich, and he shared that artist's romantic attitude, although in a more subjective manner. The two friends went on a walking tour of the Riesengebirge in 1810. During his many hikes with Friedrich, the two painted numerous sketches and observations from nature. He may have painted the staffage in some of Friedrich's early work??such as Morning in the Riesengebirge (1810?C11), a result of their walking tour. He was also a friend of the painter Louise Seidler, who described him as "an altogether splendid and comical fellow" and often served as his model. In 1813 Seidler helped Kersting send a number of his works to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Goethe was impressed and recommended that the Grand Duke Charles Augustus purchase his work The Embroiderer. Kersting's most lasting works are his figures in interiors that borrow from seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting. These paintings nevertheless feel contemporary due to the situations depicted and the effect of the artist's personality. The characters are often viewed from the back, as in Friedrich's work, and the scenes provide hints of narrative as the figures engage privately in everyday activities. A number of his works refer to his time in the volunteer corps, the "L??tzow rangers". He drew a full-length self-portrait in 1813, in which he wore the rangers' uniform. The painting On Sentry Duty (1815) depicts three rangers, including the artist Ferdinand Hartmann and the writer Theodor Körner, who fought with Kersting and died in wars against the French.
Francois-Rene Moreaux
painted Announcement of Independence in 1844