Bruno Liljefors

“Goldfinches" is a prime example of Bruno Liljefors’ painting at its best. The small, refined and intimate cut-outs from nature dating from the 1880s are also some of the artist’s best-loved and most sought-after works. In these daringly cropped compositions the artist gets incredibly close to his subject, depicting the varied fauna of the Uppland countryside. The composition model bears clear traces of influences from contemporary French painting, and, not least, the Japanese woodcuts which were ‘à la mode’ in the 1880s, although Liljefors himself denied ever having studied Japanese art. When he replicates these forested slopes, fields and open meadows of his home turf, teeming with wildlife, he sometimes, however, chooses “steep" angles and surprising asymetrical slants, with flowers, blades of grass or, as in the present work, thistles (whose calligraphic representation is reminiscent of Oriental art...) with a pair of goldfinches right in the foreground.