The Fox Family, by Bruno Liljefors. In the National Museum at Stockholm the foxes steal farther and farther into the forest. Some- times he pictures the Wild Geese flapping their wings heav- ily, as they descend toward the lake shore in the quiet spring evening and are greeted by the cackling of their comrades. The latter theme has been treated by the artist on an enor- mous canvas with a red evening sky, hanging in the Copen- hagen Art Museum, and again, with a more sensitive touch perhaps, in a small picture owned by the architect Boberg, Spring Evening and Wild Geese, in which two of the big birds flit past in the buoyant spring air against a pearl-col- ored sky. In certain of his works the artist seeks the monumental effect, sometimes also the dramatic, and both of these qual- ities are combined in the famous picture Sea-eagles, painted in 1897 and now in the National Museum. The enormous billow in The Breakers, in Prince Eugen's gallery, produces the same effect of bigness. The largest and best collection of Liljefors paintings in existence is owned by Ernest Thiel, whose gallery of modern, especially of Swedish, art from the beginning of the twentieth century is one of the most im- portant that have ever been established in our country. Thiel possesses a number of the ground studies, where Liljefors dwells upon what is known as protective coloring, letting small, shapely snipes or mottled curlews conceal themselves -186- |