Eider Ducks

Liljefors is the painter of the Nordic animal world, and the birds of the Swedish coast were his life’s subject. He studied at the Stockholm Academy between 1879 and 1882, then went abroad and learned to work from living animals rather than from the studio; back home he began to paint what he had watched for himself along the shore and in the archipelago, putting his birds into the light and weather they actually live in. The eider ducks here are on the water, the drake’s pale head and back set against the deeper tone of the sea, the whole canvas built out of close observation of plumage and posture and of the way the light lies on a moving surface. What had been a tradition of conventional animal painting becomes, in his hands, a portrait of a habitat. It is held in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.