Sheep in landscape with a brook.

Sheep grazing along a brook in a Danish landscape combines two subjects with deep roots in the Northern European painting tradition: the pastoral scene of domesticated animals in open countryside, and the riparian landscape of stream and associated vegetation. Sheep had appeared in Dutch seventeenth-century landscapes, in the British pastoral tradition of Constable and the Norwich School, and in the Danish Golden Age—and continued as a viable subject into the Post-Impressionist era. Agersnap's treatment situates the grazing sheep within a specific landscape type: the small stream threaded through rough pasture characteristic of parts of Jutland.

The white fleeces of the sheep provide naturalistic light accents within the landscape's earth-toned palette. Agersnap would place them along the brook's margin where the contrast between pale animals, dark water, and green pasture vegetation is most visually effective and naturalistic.