Bruno Liljefors : La Suède Sauvage

Exhibition at the Petit Palais, Paris, 1 October 2024 - 16 February 2025

At the end of the 19th century, the Swedish painter Bruno Liljefors (1860-1939) set himself the goal of revealing the beauty of Swedish nature. He depicted the vital energy that animates this wild world with virtuosity and poetry. Abandoning the picturesque, he concentrated on depicting animals in their daily lives, in an explosion of detail and colour: the great horned owl in the heart of the deep forest, flights of wild geese in the twilight, but also the immensity of the waters bordering the Stockholm archipelago. The plumage becomes goldsmith's patterns, the silent lakes herald the blue dawn... Through wild nature, the artist reveals the soul of Sweden in his work.

This catalogue of the first exhibition devoted to Liljefors in France brings together a collection of 100 works (paintings, drawings and photographs) whose subjects are exclusively dedicated to Swedish nature and the animals that inhabit it. The book reveals the pictorial virtuosity and original contribution of the artist who, although less well known than his acolytes Carl Larsson and Anders Zorn, remains a key figure on the Scandinavian art scene of the late 19th century.