Cutting Christmas trees.

H. A. Brendekilde's 'Cutting Christmas Trees' (1885) is a seasonal Danish rural genre subject — the cutting of Christmas trees in the Danish forest as an annual ritual that combined commercial forestry with the domestic celebration of the Christmas season. Brendekilde's engagement with Danish rural life encompassed the full calendar of seasonal agricultural and domestic activities, and the Christmas tree cutting placed his rural subjects within the specifically seasonal anticipation of the holiday. The winter forest setting with workers engaged in seasonal labor was characteristic of his broader rural genre practice.

Brendekilde renders the winter forest scene with attention to the seasonal atmospheric conditions — the bare deciduous trees, the potential snow on the ground or branches, and the cold quality of winter light in the Danish forest. His figures of the tree cutters provide the human scale and labor content within the seasonal landscape. The specific activity of selecting and cutting Christmas trees gives the genre subject its distinctive seasonal identity.