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 :. | Eiders at Sunrise | gasstrack | Portrait of Father | branning | morgon |
Related Artists:
Pompeo Mariani
(Monza, Province of Milan 1857 - Bordighera, Province of Imperia, 1927) was an Italian painter. The nephew of Mose Bianchi, Mariani abandoned a career in banking to devote himself entirely to painting. His apprenticeship began in 1879 under the guidance of the painter Eleuterio Pagliano, who introduced him to life studies. A trip to Egypt with Uberto DelleOrto in 1881 provided subjects for the works shown at the Brera exhibitions of the next two years. He focused on landscape painting and began to specialise in seascapes in 1883, when he first stayed on the coast of Liguria. The first views of the Zelata area outside Pavia appeared in 1894. His art is characterised by subtle sensitivity in the investigation of the reflection of light on water, captured in different seasons and times of the day to achieve highly atmospheric effects. In was at the beginning of the new century that he began to combine naturalistic landscapes with depictions of the elegant world of high society in fashionable gatherings and cafes. His vast production of landscapes and portraits was regularly presented at the major national and international exhibitions and won numerous official awards.
Jacek Mierzejewski
painted Polonia in 1915
Fernando Gallego
1466-1507 Spanish Fernando Gallego Galleries was a Spanish painter, his art is regarded as a gothic style. It is thought that he was born in Salamanca, Spain, an his first knowned works were in the cathedrals of Plasencia and Coria, in Caceres (Spain). His most famous knowned works are: The Retablo of San Ildefonso, in the Cathedral of Zamora The Sky of Salamanca, in the University of Salamanca. The retablo of Ciudad Rodrigo, now in the Tucson Museum, University of Arizona, USA. The Arcenillas panels, placed in Zamora. San Acacio and the 10,000 Martyrs, at the Meadows Museum. The last time that he was named in a document is in 1507, but we do not know the date of the death.