This painting depicts a well-known swimming hole on the Deerfield River near the artist’s home at The Bars, Deerfield, Massachusetts. When this was painted, the artist, George Fuller (1822-1884), was living in New York City. His sketchbook, though, shows a watercolor and graphite image of this scene taken from life in the summer of 1854, when he came home to visit. Fuller placed a group of bathers on the rocks, perhaps remembering the swimming days of his youth. In 1859, his father died and Fuller came back to run the family’s farm.