Twilight over landscape with stretching ducks and hunter

This 1927 canvas depicting ducks in flight at twilight with a hunter in the landscape integrates the human presence of hunting with Liljefors's primary concern with wildlife in its natural habitat. The hunter is a rare figure in his compositions — present here not as protagonist but as part of the ecological and cultural landscape of a Swedish hunting evening. Duck flighting at dusk, when ducks move between roosting and feeding grounds, was a specific form of wildfowling that Liljefors had practised personally and observed extensively. The inclusion of the hunter signals this cultural context while the ducks in flight remain the visual and compositional focus. Twilight's flattened tones and dramatic sky colours presented the same atmospheric challenge as the swan dusk painting, here combined with the kinetic challenge of birds in flight. The horizontal landscape stretches below the action in the sky, and the composition requires the viewer's eye to move between sky and ground, human and bird, in a more complex spatial negotiation than his single-subject wildlife studies.

The sky dominates the upper half of the composition, rendered in the warm-to-cool gradations of a northern twilight. Ducks are silhouetted or partially silhouetted against this lit sky, their forms simplified by the failing light. The hunter below is small relative to the aerial subject, emphasising the scale and freedom of the birds' world above the human figure.