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Bruno Andreas Liljefors (; 14 May 1860 – 18 December 1939) was a Swedes artist. He is perhaps best known for his nature and animal motifs, especially in dramatic situations. He was the most important and probably most influential Swedish wildlife painter of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Hammond, Nicholas, Modern Wildlife Painting, Pica Press, 1998, , pp.31–40. He also drew some sequential picture stories, making him one of the early Swedish comic creators.
In 1887, he married Anna Olivia Olofsson (1864–1947). The marriage ended with a divorce in 1895, at which time he married his first wife's younger sister, Signe Adolfina Helena Olofsson (1871–1944). He was a resident of Uppsala until the summer of 1894, when he sought out the Stockholm archipelago. From 1905–1917, he lived at Ytterjärna in Södermanland and from 1917 to Österbybruk in Uppland. He established a studio in Österbybruk, where he lived and worked between 1917 and 1932.
During the last years of the nineteenth century, a brooding element entered his work, perhaps the result of turmoil in his private life. He was often short of money and in 1925, he suffered a facial neuralgia with severe pain. From 1932, Liljefors lived at Kungsholmen in Stockholm. The last two years of his life, he spent in Uppsala. Liljefors died in 1939 and was buried at the Uppsala old cemetery.
The darker quality in his paintings gradually began to attract interest, and he had paintings exhibited at the Paris Salon.
The influence of the Impressionism can be seen in his attention to the effects of environment and light, and later that of Art Nouveau in his painting of , Evening Wild Ducks, of 1901, in which the pattern of the low sunlight on the water looks like leopardskin, hence the Swedish nickname Panterfällen. 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 against woodland, and his most successful painting of this subject is the large-scale 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, painted in 1889.
Collections of his art are on display at the Nationalmuseum, Gothenburg Museum of Art, Thiel Gallery and Uppsala University. His work was also part of the painting event in the art competition at the 1932 Summer Olympics.
The greatness of Liljefors lay in his ability to show animals in their environment. 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 1883–84, 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:
Nevertheless, Liljefors was a pioneer at a time when wildlife art was still emerging from its association with scientific depiction and taxidermy. He also set a standard of identification with the landscape that substantially influenced the development of wildlife art in the twentieth century.
Work
Liljefors is held in high esteem by painters of wildlife and is acknowledged as an influence by, for example, American wildlife artist Michael Coleman. 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. However, he never exaggerated the ferocity of the predator or the pathos of the prey, and his pictures are devoid of sentimentality.
Style
He amassed a collection of animals to act as his living models. Ernst Malmberg recalled:
Assessment
Such practices have sometimes led to criticism of Liljefors' work; Lars Jonsson has noted a "heraldisation" of the drama in Golden Eagle Chasing a Hare, 1904, which causes a departure from pure naturalism, and he deduces from the position of the eagle's wing feathers that it would have been gliding rather than turning in reaction to the hare as painted.
Paintings
Other sources
External links
Categories: 19th-century Swedish Painters, Swedish Male Painters, 20th-century Swedish Painters, Swedish Animal Artists, Swedish Painters Of Animals, Swedish Comics Artists, 1860 Births, 1939 Deaths, Burials At Uppsala Old Cemetery, Art Competitors At The 1932 Summer Olympics, 19th-century Swedish Male Artists, 20th-century Swedish Male Artists, Artists From Uppsala
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