Deer Hunter in the Woods was painted in 1864, just one year after Brown was elected to full membership in the National Academy of Design, at a time when his artistic career was picking up steam. Clearly an ambitious work, this painting is a particularly entry in the artist's career in the sense that it marks a departure from "artistic safety". Brown gave up his job at his father-in-law's glass factoryu and committed himself to painting professionally in the late 1850s, earning most of his income from commissioned portraits and the initial sales of his later popular genre scenes. In the summer of 1860 he moved into the famed tenth street studio in New York. It is thought that the first years of his occupancy at the studio gave him his first real exposure to the preraphaelites through the work of Charles Herbert Moore; a fellow tenant until 1861.

As Martha Hoppin notes, Brown firmly embraced the preraphaelite philosophy and technique around this time: "Brown was fascinated with the effect of small patches of sunlight sprinkled over a leafy, shaded forest interior and explored this contrast of sunlight and shadow through the rest of his career. Possibly he was inspired by the work of American Pre-Raphaelite William Trost Richards, who painted a number of landscapes in the late 1850s and early 1860s which feature wooded glades dappled with sunlight." (Hoppin, pp. 9,10)

This work was previously unknown and has no known exhibition record. Ms. Hoppin has suggested that the work was probably a commissioned painting and not completed with the intent of showing it at the Academy. Deerhunter in the Woods relates directly to several other commissioned works of the mid-1860s, most notably, Claiming the Shot: After the Hunt in the Adirondacks, of 1865 which is now in the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts.