The Secret River - Emerald Pool

A bit further up the Peabody River from our secret swimming hole is the site of Albert Bierstadt’s 1870 painting, The Emerald Pool. For a fascinating discussion of this painting and its place in the cultural and economic history of the region, I direct your attention to the (somewhat scholarly, but still worth plowing through) article by Nancy Siegal in the Autum 2005 issue of Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide: “I never had so difficult a picture to paint”: Albert Bierstadt’s White Mountain Scenery and The Emerald Pool.

Not that this picture has much to do with Bierstadt’s application of his approach to Western landscapes to the more intimate settings of the East, except for proximity. I’ve tried to capture here the clarity of the water (the pool in the foreground is a couple feet deep), and a lone trout flyfisher who was working her way down the Peabody while we played on the rocks. This is by far my favorite place to visit on our too-infrequent trips to see Granddad; it’s as simple a pleasure as you can find. And so long as you keep it a secret between just us, it will remain so for another hundred and fifty years.