Vildgæs

The museum keeps the title in two languages — Vildgæs in Danish and Rastande vildgäss in Swedish, resting wild geese — and bought the canvas in May 1898, the year it was painted and signed. Bruno Liljefors was born in Uppsala and trained at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts from 1879 to 1882; he joined the Artists’ Association in 1886, taught at the Valand Academy in Gothenburg in 1888 and 1889, and is by common consent the foremost Swedish painter of wildlife, keeping living animals as models in order to study the forms and camouflage patterns of birds and beasts at first hand. He is known above all for the drama of predator and prey and for birds in their own habitat, and towards the end of the century a darker, more brooding note entered his work. The museum has shown this picture in the exhibition Clinch! in 2004 and in the 2023–24 Liljefors exhibition at Nivaagaards Malerisamling. The painting is held in the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark).