A girl guarding geese on the island of Bornholm.

Carl Frederik Aagaard was a Danish painter who specialized in atmospheric landscape subjects — his engagement with the specific Danish landscape, including the island of Bornholm in the Baltic, connecting him to the broader Danish Naturalist tradition. His 'Girl Guarding Geese on Bornholm' (1888) combines the pastoral genre subject (the goose girl or goose boy as a perennial figure in European rural genre painting) with the specific landscape of the most distinctly un-Danish of Danish territories — Bornholm's granite landscape contrasting with the flat agricultural land of the main island.

Aagaard renders the goose-guarding girl within the Bornholm landscape with his characteristic attention to the atmospheric conditions of the specific setting — the island's granite character, different vegetation, and the quality of Baltic light on this particular island creating a landscape quite different from Zealand or Jutland. His handling of the geese as compositional elements and the girl's figure within the pastoral setting demonstrates his control of the genre subject's formal requirements.