Paper short abstract

The Swedish artist Bruno Liljefors’s paintings of nature have become synonymous with so-called national art. This paper juxtaposes turn of the century discourse on the perceived need for national art with Liljefors’s visual expression deeply influenced by Japanese art and japonisme.

Paper long abstract

Few artists have done more to visually define Swedish nature than the painter Bruno Liljefors (1860–1939). Through close studies of predators and animals of prey such as hares, foxes, cats, ducks, and birds of prey, Liljefors forged a powerful image of Swedish wildlife that has come to occupy a canonical position within narratives of national art. Yet this seemingly “native” vision of nature emerged through profoundly transnational visual practices.

Partly trained in Paris at the height of the dissemination of Japonisme, Liljefors developed a pictorial language shaped by transcultural circulation rather than national isolation. His working methods further complicate notions of authenticity: while living in a country house outside Stockholm, he maintained an extensive menagerie of semi-domesticated and wild animals, conducted systematic studies of living specimens, and made use of photographic techniques, including staged photographs of taxidermied animals posed within natural settings. These practices informed a visual style characterized by radical cropping, asymmetrical composition, flattened pictorial space, and dynamic viewpoints features closely aligned with Japanese art and its European reception.

What makes Liljefors a particularly productive case study for examining the presence of Japanese visual culture in Sweden is the paradoxical reception of his work as exemplary national art. His contemporary and close associate Richard Bergh, an artist, museum director, and theorist, conducted a twenty year long campaign to define national art through direct engagement with nature. Liljefors art posed simultaneously a solution in its focus on Swedish wild life, and a problem by its visual language. Through influential collectors such as the banker Ernst Thiel, Liljefors’ work became foundational to Swedish conceptions of national art around 1900.

This paper examines how ideas about nature and its artistic representation circulated transnationally by juxtaposing Swedish debates on national art with the visual strategies employed in Liljefors’ paintings.