Mallards taking off

Painted in 1923, this canvas of mallards taking off from water captures the explosive energy of waterfowl rising from the surface — one of the most kinetically demanding subjects in wildlife painting. Liljefors had painted ducks across his entire career in multiple contexts: resting, in flight, as prey, in seasonal landscapes. The take-off moment is particularly challenging because it requires the painter to compress an instant of maximum physical exertion and spatial transition — from water to air — into a single static image. Liljefors resolved this by studying the exact wing positions and body angles of birds in the first milliseconds of flight, drawing on both careful field observation and anatomical knowledge of the muscular and skeletal structure of waterbird wings. By 1923 he had a complete visual vocabulary for depicting bird flight that no contemporary in European art could match. The mallard's distinctive plumage — the male's iridescent green head, the female's mottled brown — provided a further compositional resource: warm and cool tones arranged in upward diagonal movement.

The take-off moment requires careful compositional management of multiple simultaneous actions: wings spread and beating downward, feet pushing from the water surface, bodies rotating from horizontal to near-vertical. Liljefors resolves this by capturing the arrangement at the single moment of maximum visual clarity, when the birds are just clear of the water but still in close proximity to it.