The Trout Pool, Worthington Whittredge
In the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
One of the younger generation of the Hudson River School painters, Whittredge often favored intimate forest scenes as much as large dramatic landscapes.
Here, through the framing device of the dark mature trees, their leafy canopy and the fallen log, we are invited to enter a rocky glade; and further — through the break in the rock wall where the creek enters into the pool with a modest fall, we can venture into the space of the dark creek bed beyond. The painting is a nested composition — almost a landscape version of a Pieter de Hooch interior.
I love the way the dappled light against the large foreground trees is repeated in the light-against-dark trunks of smaller trees around the falls.
