Bruno Liljefors

Bo Lindwall and Lindorm Liljefors, Bruno Liljefors, Stockholm, 1960, pp. 37 & 40, discussed; p. 36, illustrated

Original canvas. There are scattered spots of retouching visible under ultraviolet light. Apart from scattered small areas of craquelure and slight paint separation, mainly to the centre and upper left, this work is in good condition, with excellent detail. Held in a narrow, decorative, gold-painted moulded plaster and wood frame.
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In this important early work by Liljefors two mischievous boys making their way home from school chase a frightened squirrel. Their school work comically discarded, they wield a book and a hat in their attempt to capture the petrified creature.

Despite its apparent immediacy, as Liljefors' staged photograph of the compostion reveals (fig. 1), the artist went to considerable lengths to freeze the action represented so that he could capture the moment in paint. His desire to work from a photograph in order to render the subject as accurately as possible signals in part his great knowledge and love of the outdoors, his keen eye as a sportsman and his profound desire to record the incredible variety of the natural world around him in minute detail. The lengths to which he went to stage manage such a light hearted drama, however, is also a clear indication of the rigorous academic training in composition that he had received while a student in the early 1880s first in Stockholm and then in Düsseldorf.

Liljefors had inherited his interest in animals, the countryside and hunting from his father, and his inclination for animal painting developed while he was at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm which he entered in 1879. In 1882 he left for Düsseldorf, where he studied under the German animal painter C.F. Deiker. From Germany he travelled on to Italy and then Paris, briefly joining Carl Larsson at Grez-sur-Loing the year the present work was painted. However, although he exhibited then and later at the Paris Salon, he did not remain long in France. He wrote about life at Grez dismissively to his brother: 'Here it's all so damned picturesque that it sometimes makes you feel sick.' (quoted in Torsten Gunnarsson, Nordic Landscape Painting in the Nineteenth Century, London, 1998, p. 165). 

Rejecting the cliché of the artist's colony, Liljefors returned to Sweden to pursue his quest for truth to nature in his work. In the ensuing years he developed a unique position as a remarkably gifted recorder of wildlife in its native habitat, a formidable reputation as artist-ecologist, and a successful career as a painter. 

Fig. 1. Preparatory photograph for The Squirrel Catchers