View from Jægersborg Dyrehave.

Carl Frederik Aagaard's 'View from Jægersborg Dyrehave' (1889) depicts the famous deer park north of Copenhagen — Jægersborg Dyrehave ('the hunting forest's deer park') had been a royal hunting preserve since the seventeenth century and was by the nineteenth century a beloved public recreational landscape. The deer park's combination of ancient oaks, freely roaming deer, and the specific quality of the managed natural landscape created a distinctive subject world that Danish painters regularly engaged with. Aagaard's view captured the park's characteristic qualities of old woodland and open glade.

Aagaard renders the Dyrehave landscape with his atmospheric sensitivity — the ancient oak trees' gnarled forms and heavy canopy creating the specific character of the old deer park, the open glades between the oaks providing the spatial variation that animated the composition. The specific quality of light filtering through old oak canopy is quite different from the younger beech forests he also depicted, and his handling of this atmospheric difference reflects his close observational engagement with different Danish woodland types.