Two shepherd boys.

Carl Frederik Aagaard's 'Two Shepherd Boys' (1885) is a pastoral genre subject in the tradition of European rural genre painting — the shepherd boy as a figure connecting the contemporary rural world to the long history of pastoral poetry and painting, from Virgil's Eclogues through the Dutch and Flemish rural genre of the seventeenth century. His Danish shepherd boys placed this ancient subject within the specific context of the Danish agricultural landscape and its working children.

Aagaard renders the two shepherd boys with his characteristic combination of pastoral naturalness and individual observation — the boys depicted as specific children rather than generic pastoral types, their relationship to each other and to the animals they tend creating the social content of the genre subject. His handling of the Danish outdoor light on the figures and the pastoral landscape creates the atmospheric context for the traditional subject.