Bruno Liljefors – master of animal painting, Bullerö and the Swedish wilderness
Bruno Liljefors's art forever changed how Swedes see nature, and his subjects are still among the most sought-after when it comes to posters and paintings featuring Swedish nature motifs. Whereas earlier generations' animal painting had been neat and contrived - a still life with feathers - Liljefors painted starving foxes, eagles fighting over a carcass, and eiders resting on a skerry in the gray haze. He was born in Uppsala in 1860 and died in the same city in 1939, and in between he produced one of the most extensive and distinctive bodies of work in Nordic art history.
He was a hunter, ornithologist, gymnast, and painter all in one, and that combination makes him difficult to categorize. His nature scenes are both scientifically precise and deeply subjective. Thielska Galleriet in Stockholm owns the world's largest collection of his paintings, and in 2024-2025 he had his first major French retrospective at the Petit Palais in Paris. This page examines Liljefors's life, his most important works, his painting technique, and how his visual world works on a wall in a modern Swedish home.
Contents
↓ Who was Bruno Liljefors?
↓ From Uppsala to Bullerö - life and turning points
↓ Liljefors's most important works
↓ Technique, vision, and artistic signature
↓ The legacy and international influence
↓ Liljefors at home - a practical interior design guide
↓ Timeline
↓ Related artists
↓ Frequently asked questions about Bruno Liljefors
Who was Bruno Liljefors?
Bruno Andreas Liljefors was born on May 14, 1860, in Uppsala, the son of merchant Anders Liljefors and Maria Margareta Lindbäck. Today, he is regarded as Sweden's foremost animal painter and one of the world's most influential nature artists around the turn of the twentieth century. His contribution was innovative in a way that achieved international reach: he moved animal painting from illustration to fully fledged landscape painting, where the animal is not a portrait subject but part of an ecological context.
What distinguishes him from the European animal painters of his time is that he refused to idealize. In the German school - for example, Carl Friedrich Deiker, whom Liljefors sought out in Düsseldorf in 1882 - the animal was often a heraldic focal point. In Liljefors's work, the animal is prey or hunter, camouflaged against last year's grass or snow-laden spruce branches, sometimes almost impossible to make out. This compositional principle - allowing the subject to almost disappear into the background - was radical in the 1880s and foreshadowed what nature photography would look like half a century later.
Quick facts: Born 14 May 1860 in Uppsala, died 18 December 1939 in Uppsala. Student at the Royal Academy’s preparatory school from 1879, left the academy in 1882. Teacher at Valand Art School in Gothenburg 1888–1889. Lived in Ytterjärna in Södermanland from 1905–1917, then in Österby in Uppland. Bought the island of Bullerö in Stockholm’s outer archipelago in 1908. Breakthrough work Sea Eagles was signed in 1897. The Thiel Gallery owns more than fifty paintings - the world’s largest collection. Auction record: Cat in a Summer Meadow, 10.7 million kronor at Stockholms Auktionsverk.
From Uppsala to Bullerö - life and turning points
Liljefors’s biography is unusual among Swedish artists in that it is as much about landscapes and waters as it is about studios and exhibitions. He spent most of his adult life in direct physical contact with the animals he painted, and most of his decisive turning points are connected to a place rather than to a scholarship.
Growing up in Uppsala and the early gaze on nature
Uppsala in the 1860s and 1870s was a small town surrounded by farmland, oak pastures, and the forests of the Uppsala Ridge. Liljefors grew up in a merchant family but spent his time in the countryside, and he began hunting early. That knowledge - how a hare sits in its form, how a black grouse displays, how the light lies across the snow in March - became his true education. Uppsala University still ranks among the institutions with representative collections of his works, together with the Nationalmuseum and the Gothenburg Museum of Art.
The Royal Academy in 1879 and the break in 1882
He enrolled as a student at the Royal Academy’s preparatory school in 1879. The teaching was academic in the strict sense: studies of antiquity, plaster casts, and a fixed progression of exercises. Liljefors, who could already draw animals from memory, found the system difficult and left the academy in 1882 - the same spirit of the age that would give rise to the Swedish Opponents’ movement, whose ideas he shared with most of his generation. The movement found its sharpest polemical voice in Ernst Josephson, and its most commercially successful one in Anders Zorn.
Düsseldorf, Grez-sur-Loing and the European apprenticeship
After leaving, he traveled via Denmark to Düsseldorf in 1882, where he sought out the animal painter Carl Friedrich Deiker. The meeting was as much a demarcation as an apprenticeship: Liljefors absorbed the German school’s anatomical precision but rejected its theatrical staging. On his journey home, he spent time, among other places, in the international artists’ colony at Grez-sur-Loing south of Fontainebleau, the same village where a number of Nordic artists worked during the 1880s and where plein-air painting - painting directly in front of the subject - was the norm. It was there that he acquired the tools to turn his studies of nature into finished paintings.
Ytterjärna, Bullerö, and Österby
In 1888-1889, he taught at Valand Art School in Gothenburg, but teaching suited him poorly. From 1905 to 1917, he lived in Ytterjärna in Södermanland, and in 1908 he bought the island of Bullerö in the outer Stockholm archipelago. At Rävängen on Bullerö, he built a hunting lodge that the family used during the summers from 1908 to 1923, and from there he could study the archipelago’s birds in their natural environment. Bullerö and the surrounding waters are now a nature reserve encompassing around 900 islands, islets, and skerries. From 1917, he lived in Österby in Uppland, and in 1934 he published the book The Realm of the Wild. He died in Uppsala on December 18, 1939.
Liljefors’s Most Important Works
Liljefors’s output is very large and uneven - he painted at times to support a family, and the quality varies. But around ten paintings from the 1880s and 1890s belong to the core of Swedish art history, and they all have in common that they redefined what an animal subject could be.
Fox Family (1886)
In Fox Family from 1886, a fox family shares its prey. The subject is strikingly undramatic: no hunt, no struggle, just the animals’ everyday life and the relationship between them. It sounds simple, but in the 1880s it was a programmatic choice. Liljefors argued that the animal’s life in itself - eating, resting, staying alert - was sufficiently worthy of depiction without the painter needing to build a story with a moral into it. Fox motifs then became his most recurring subjects, and they still dominate his auction market today.
White-Tailed Eagle’s Nest (1892) and White-Tailed Eagles (1897)
The white-tailed eagle became Liljefors’s monumental subject. White-Tailed Eagle’s Nest from 1892 depicts an eagle’s nest in rocky terrain, while White-Tailed Eagles - signed in 1897 and now in the Nationalmuseum collection - is the intense, dramatic version with the eagles as the absolute focal point. The painting caused a sensation at the Stockholm Exhibition that same year and marked his definitive breakthrough in Sweden. The fact that the white-tailed eagle was almost extinct in Sweden in the 1970s and subsequently became one of Swedish nature conservation’s greatest successes has, in retrospect, given the images a significance Liljefors himself could not have foreseen.
Mood at the Seashore (1896) and Eiders on a Skerry (1920)
In 1896, financier Ernest Thiel bought Liljefors’s large painting Mood at the Seashore. That purchase marked the beginning of Thiel’s intensive art collecting, which in turn became the foundation of the Thiel Gallery on Djurgården. A quarter of a century later, in 1920, Liljefors painted Eiders on a Skerry, directly inspired by the waters around Bullerö. The eider motif shows his later style: broader brushwork, less preoccupation with detail, and greater interest in how the color of the bird’s back responds to the color of the wet granite.
"Bruno Liljefors is without a doubt one of the world's greatest animal painters." - Swedish Biographical Dictionary, National Archives of Sweden
Technique, Vision, and Artistic Signature
There is a technical logic behind why Liljefors's paintings feel different from almost all other animal painting, and it can be described concretely. Three devices recur throughout his work and explain why the motifs work so well even in a small format on a wall.
Camouflage as a Compositional Principle
Liljefors painted the animal as it actually appears in nature: partially concealed. The fox's fur shares the same warm ochre as the withered grass, the black plumage of the black grouse blends into the spruce shadow, and the hare is almost nothing more than an outline against the snow. The effect is that the eye has to work - the viewer discovers the animal instead of having it presented to them. This is a direct consequence of his knowledge of hunting. He had trained his eye to find animals in the terrain, and he built that experience into the image.
The Cropped Image Edge and Japanese Influence
He often crops the motif abruptly: a bird's wing extends beyond the image, a tree trunk divides the composition asymmetrically, the horizon is placed extremely high or low. He shared this device with the Impressionists, and the origin is the same - the Japanese woodblock prints that flooded Europe from the 1860s onward. Similar solutions can be found in Edgar Degas and in an even purer form in Japanese ukiyo-e, where bird-and-flower imagery was a genre in its own right.
The Light and Nordic Daylight
Liljefors's palette is built on the muted light of Sweden. March mornings with bluish snow, November days with brown leaves and gray skies, Midsummer nights when nothing is truly dark. He generally avoided strong midday light, since wildlife is most active at dawn and dusk - and because the Nordic daylight gives colors a subdued, cohesive scale. That very scale makes his motifs fit so well in Swedish homes, where they rarely clash with wall colors or textiles.
The Legacy and International Influence
For a long time, Liljefors was an almost exclusively Swedish concern. He was enormously popular at home, reproduced in editions of school wall charts and hunting magazines, and that very popularity made him suspect in modernist art criticism - too beloved by the public, too figurative, too close to illustration. During the 2000s, that assessment changed dramatically.
The clearest confirmation came when the Petit Palais in Paris presented Bruno Liljefors, la Suède sauvage from October 1, 2024, to February 16, 2025. The exhibition included around one hundred works - paintings, drawings, and photographs - with Nationalmuseum in Stockholm as a partner and loans from the Thielska Gallery, the Gothenburg Museum of Art, and a large number of private collections. The Thielska Gallery alone lent six paintings to Paris. For the Petit Palais, it marked the conclusion of a trilogy on the Swedish trio Larsson, Zorn, and Liljefors, following solo exhibitions on Carl Larsson in 2014 and Anders Zorn in 2017.
In market terms, he ranks among the most expensive Swedish artists of all time. The painting Cat in a Summer Meadow sold for SEK 10.7 million at Stockholms Auktionsverk’s classic auction, a record for the artist, while Ducks reached SEK 9.1 million at Bukowskis. The fact that his works command such prices says something about how deeply rooted these motifs are in the Swedish self-image - they function simultaneously as art history and as a national depiction of nature. His place in the broader Nordic art tradition is thus secure, and he belongs in the same context as John Bauer, who at roughly the same time turned the Swedish forest into a realm of fairy tales rather than an ecosystem.
His works can now be found in the Nationalmuseum collections, at the Thielska Gallery, in the Gothenburg Museum of Art, and at Uppsala University. A detailed biographical overview can be found in Wikipedia’s article on Bruno Liljefors.
A Forerunner of Nature Photography
Part of the explanation for why Liljefors’s images feel so contemporary is that they anticipated a medium that did not yet exist. When he painted a capercaillie half-hidden behind spruce branches in the 1890s, or a fox moving at the edge of the frame, he solved the same compositional problem that nature photographers would grapple with from the 1930s onward: how to show an animal without misrepresenting how it actually behaves. The 2024-2025 Petit Palais exhibition focused on precisely this by displaying photographs alongside the paintings. Liljefors himself used the camera as study material, and the boundary between his painted and photographed observations is therefore less clear than one might think.
From popular favorite to reassessed artist
For much of the 20th century, Liljefors was simultaneously Sweden’s most reproduced and least discussed painter by art critics. His motifs were printed on school charts, in hunting literature and on wall calendars on a scale few other artists achieved, which paradoxically made him invisible to modernist critics – he was perceived as a nature painter rather than a visual artist. His reappraisal gathered momentum in the first decades of the 21st century, driven partly by renewed interest in figurative painting and partly by ecological issues that made his choice of subjects relevant again. Nationalmuseum’s participation as a partner in an international retrospective in 2024 is the clearest confirmation that he is now regarded as an artist of European stature, not a national specialty.
Liljefors at home - a practical interior design guide
There is a reason Liljefors’s motifs are so easy to place on a wall that is rarely mentioned: the color palette is already muted. Where a colorful poster requires the rest of the room to give way, a Liljefors image in ochre, moss green and lead grey can coexist with almost anything. Below are practical tips based on how the motifs are actually constructed.
Choose the format based on the motif’s depth
Liljefors’s compositions often have depth – grass in the foreground, the animal in the middle ground, mist or forest in the background. That depth is lost in a small format. A fox painting or an archipelago scene with three picture planes looks best in 50×70 cm or 70×100 cm, while more tightly cropped motifs – a single bird, a detailed study – work excellently in 30×40 cm. Rule of thumb: the more landscape the image contains, the larger the print should be. An overview of sizes and proportions can be found in our guide to choosing the right art for your home.
Frame choice: warm wood over black metal
The thin black metal frame that works so well with graphic artwork clashes with Liljefors’s palette. His images almost always have a warm undertone - autumn leaves, dry grass, fox fur - and a frame in oak, walnut or warm grey-stained pine extends that tone instead of breaking it. An off-white or sand-colored mat also gives the image breathing room without introducing a cold whiteness. Read more about choosing frames and mats in our guide to framing art.
Placement and light
Because the motifs are painted in low natural light, they lose contrast when hung in harsh direct sunlight. A wall perpendicular to the window, or a wall in the inner part of the room, gives the image the kind of daylight it was designed for. Also avoid hanging a nature motif too high - they work best with the center of the image around 145-150 cm above the floor, at eye level for a standing adult. If the motif is to be part of a larger grouping, the principles are collected in our guide to gallery walls.
Combine with other Swedish art
Liljefors’s nature motifs pair exceptionally well with other Swedish art from the same period - Carl Larsson’s interiors, Anders Zorn’s figure studies, and John Bauer’s forest scenes. What they all have in common is a muted, earthy color palette and a format that can be hung closely together. A mixed grouping with two nature motifs and one figure motif is usually more lively than three pictures of the same kind. More ideas for creating such groupings can be found in the article about decorating with posters.
Tip: If you hang a Liljefors motif in a bedroom or hallway - rooms you pass through quickly - choose a tightly cropped motif with a clear silhouette. Landscape motifs with camouflaged animals require you to pause and search the image, and that quality is best appreciated above a sofa or beside a reading area where the eye can rest for a while.
Timeline
1860 – Bruno Andreas Liljefors is born on 14 May in Uppsala, the son of merchant Anders Liljefors and Maria Margareta Lindbäck.
1879 – Enrolls as a student at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts’ preparatory school in Stockholm.
1882 – Leaves the academy and travels via Denmark to Düsseldorf, where he seeks out animal painter Carl Friedrich Deiker. On his way home, he stays in the artists’ colony in Grez-sur-Loing.
1886 – Paints Fox Family, one of the early works that establishes his approach of depicting animals’ everyday lives without dramatic storytelling.
1888–1889 – Teaches at Valand School of Art in Gothenburg.
1892 – Completes White-tailed Eagle’s Nest, the first of his major white-tailed eagle motifs.
1896 – Ernest Thiel buys Mood by the Sea. The purchase marks the beginning of Thiel’s intensive art collecting and lays the foundation for the Thiel Gallery.
1897 – Signs White-tailed Eagles. The painting becomes a sensation at the Stockholm Exhibition that same year and marks his definitive breakthrough in Sweden.
1905–1917 – Lives in Ytterjärna in Södermanland.
1908 – Buys the island of Bullerö in the outer Stockholm archipelago and builds a hunting lodge at Rävängen, used by the family until 1923.
1917 – Moves to Österby in Uppland, where he remains for the rest of his life.
1920 – Paints Eiders on a Skerry, inspired by the waters around Bullerö.
1934 – Publishes the book Det vildas rike.
1939 – Dies on December 18 in Uppsala, at the age of 79.
2024–2025 – The Petit Palais in Paris presents Bruno Liljefors, la Suède sauvage, featuring around one hundred works, from October 1, 2024, to February 16, 2025.
Related artists and movements
Liljefors belongs to a generation of Swedish artists who reshaped the country’s visual language around the turn of the twentieth century. He is most closely associated with Anders Zorn and Carl Larsson – together, the three form the trio to which the Petit Palais devoted a solo exhibition each. Ernst Josephson shared the Opponents’ movement’s revolt against the academy, while John Bauer interpreted the same Swedish forest in an entirely different direction.
Stylistically, Liljefors drew decisive influences from Japanese art and ukiyo-e and shared plein-air painting’s method with Impressionism. His place in the broader Nordic context is described on our page about Nordic art. If you want to explore art history more broadly, you can find all our fact pages about artists and movements in the Knowledge Base.
Frequently asked questions about Bruno Liljefors
If you want to bring home the imagery of Swedish nature, you can find our posters with nature motifs and our selection of artworks by famous artists. If you prefer a format without glass, the motifs are also available as canvas prints, which particularly suit Liljefors's muted, earthy colour palette.