Fox and Duck in Winter Landscape

This 1935 oil on canvas returns to the fox-and-duck pairing that appears across several of Liljefors's winter landscape works, combining his two most-painted mammalian and avian subjects in a single predator-prey composition. By 1935 Liljefors was in his late seventies and had been painting this subject configuration for over four decades, yet late works show no mechanical repetition but rather the continued refinement of a visual problem he found genuinely interesting. The ecological pairing of fox and duck makes biological sense: foxes hunt ducks and waterfowl where they are accessible, particularly in winter when prey choices are limited. The winter landscape setting reduces the visual world to its essentials — white ground, bare branches, grey sky — against which the fox's warm colour and the duck's contrasting form could be orchestrated with maximum clarity. The work is now in an unidentified collection, making it known primarily through photographic reproduction.

The warm-cool contrast between the fox's orange pelt and the surrounding winter whites and blues is the dominant visual organisation. The duck, whether shown as prey or in flight, provides a second focal point and a narrative context — flight path, capture, or still form — that establishes the ecological drama of the encounter.