Alfred Bramsen, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of Vilhelm Hammershøi “Vilhelm Hammershøi. Kunstneren og hans værk”, 1918, no. 110a: “From Jægersborg Allé. Pencil. The last - smaller - piece of the road closest to Jægersborg."

Illustrated: Poul Vad, “Hammershøi. Værk og Liv”, 1988, p. 141.

Provenance: Director of the National Gallery of Denmark Karl Madsen (1918).

Vad gives the following characteristic of Hammerhøi's landscapes in the above mentioned book in the chapter “Landskaberne, linjerne, afstanden” (The landscapes, the lines, the distance) (pp. 152–160):

“In his depictions of the open landscape and in his forest pictures, Hammershøi picked up the thread from the romantic landscape art of Lundbye and Skovgaard; but as with the architectural motifs, he turned the intention 180°. Instead of painting the emotion's sincere but unsentimental connection with the landscape upon the canvas, Hammershøi depicted the dual experience of heartfelt empathy and impassable distance; and instead of painting what is near and distant together in the successive connection inwards into the space of the landscape, he left out everything that could attract attention to the foreground and instead focused sharply on the middle ground; he based the image on the dialectic between the measurable extent of the horizontal plane (from one edge of the frame to the other) and the immeasurable deep space of the air's (and heaven's) perspective.” (p. 152).

The present drawing from Jægersborg Allé a little north of Copenhagen is a very fine example of a typical Hammershøi landscape, as Vad describes it above, with its characteristic focus on the middle ground, which is formed by the road flanked by tall trees, running horizontally from the left to the right edge of the paper, as seen in several of Hammershøi's major landscape works, e.g. “Kongevejen ved Gentofte”, which The David Collection acquired from Bruun Rasmussen in 2016 (Inv. no. 7/2016).