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 :. | uv i mansken | Hooded Crows | sjalvportratt | tjaderlek | buskskvstta |
Related Artists:
Harold Gilman
British 1878-1919 Harold Gilman Gallery Developing an interest in art during a childhood convalescence period, he began his artistic training after a non-collegiate year at Oxford University (again cut short by ill health) and time working as a tutor to an English family living in Odessa. Studying at the Hastings School of Art (1896) and then the Slade School of Fine Art (1897?C1901), he then spent over a year studying the Spanish masters (Velazquez as well as Whistler were major early influences) and meeting and marrying the American painter Grace Cornelia Canedy. Moving back to London, where they settled (apart from an abortive trip to visit her family in Chicago, in which Gilman ducked pressure to join the Canedy family business), they had two daughters (one in London, one in Chicago). Meeting Walter Sickert in 1907, Gilman became a founder member of both the Fitzroy Street Group (in 1907) and the Camden Town Group (in 1911). In the meantime he joined the Allied Artists' Association, moved to Letchworth, and began to show influence from work of Vuillard as well as Sickert. He soon outpaced Sickert's understanding of post-Impressionism and moved out from under his shadow, however, using ever stronger colour and identifying with Charles Ginner as a 'Neo-Realist' (exhibiting with Ginner under that label in 1914). Canal Bridge, Flekkefjord, c. 1913Gilman visited Scandinavia in 1912 and 1913, and may have travelled with the artist William Ratcliffe, who had relations there. Gilman made studies of the environment, and painted Canal Bridge, Flekkefjord, an accurate depiction, whose subject is likely to have been inspired by Vincent van Gogh's depiction of a similar bridge in Provence. Gilman had rejected Van Gogh's work when he first encountered it, but later became a strong admirer and, according to Wyndham Lewis, keeping postcards of Van Gogh's work on his wall and sometimes hanging one of his own works next to them, if he was especially satisfied with it. At that time he also joined Robert Bevan's short-lived Cumberland Market Group with Ginner and John Nash. Remarrying in 1917, in 1918 he was commissioned to travel to Nova Scotia by the Canadian War Records.
Pierre-Antoine Baudouin
French Painter, 1723-1769 French painter. A pupil of Francois Boucher, whose younger daughter he married in 1758, he specialized in miniatures painted in gouache, which he first exhibited at the Salon of 1761. He was received as a member of the Acad?mie Royale in 1763 with a small gouache of a historical subject, Phryne Accused of Impiety before the Areopagite (Paris, Louvre), and he later painted illustrations of biblical episodes. However, he made his name as a painter of libertine scenes in contemporary settings, which he exhibited regularly at the Salon from 1763 until 1769. Some of his work is directly inspired by Boucher's scenes of pastoral love, but the ostensibly moral themes and careful attention to detail of such paintings as the Modest Model (exh. Salon 1769; Washington, DC, N.G.A.) demonstrate that he was also influenced by Jean-Baptiste Greuze. His pictures were condemned for their immorality, both by the Archbishop of Paris, who in 1763 and 1765 ordered that works by Baudouin be withdrawn from the Salon, and also by Denis Diderot and other critics who accused him of pandering to the decadent taste of his patrons. Nevertheless, Baudouin was one of the most popular artists of the last decades of the ancien regime.
David Bailly
(1584-1657) was a Dutch Golden Age painter. Bailly was born at Leyden in the Dutch Republic, the son of a Flemish immigrant, calligrapher and fencing master, Peter Bailly. As a draftsman, David was pupil of his father and the copper engraver Jacques de Gheyn. David Bailly apprenticed with a surgeon-painter Adriaan Verburg in Leiden and then with Cornelius van der Voort (1576-1624), a portrait painter in Amsterdam. According to Houbraken, in the winter of 1608, Bailly took his Grand Tour, travelling to Frankfurt, Nuremberg, Augsburg Hamburg, and via Tirol to Venice, and from there to Rome. On his return he spent five months in Venice, all the while working as a journeyman where he could, before crossing the alps again in 1609. On his return voyage, Bailly worked for several German princes including the Duke of Brunswick. Upon his return to the Netherlands in 1613, Bailly began painting still-life subjects and portraits, including self-portraits and portraits of his students and professors at the University of Leiden. He is known for making a number of vanities paintings depicting transience of this life, with such ephemeral symbols as flowers and candles. Bailly taught his nephews Harmen and Pieter Steenwijck.