Cat on a Flowery Meadow

A cat sits poised amid a lush field of summer flowers, rendered with the keen naturalistic eye that made Bruno Liljefors (1860–1939) the most celebrated Swedish animal painter of his generation. The work, signed and dated 1887, was composed as one half of a ambitious diptych — paired with a companion piece, Törnskateungar (Thorn Finch Chicks), now also in the Nationalmuseum collection — and the two were formally reunited in a shared frame at the museum in 2014, some 127 years after the artist first conceived them as a pair. Liljefors was renowned for his unflinching observation of wildlife in Swedish nature, and this 61 × 76 cm oil on canvas, held by the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, is a classic example of his sunlit, meticulously observed flower-and-animal genre.