"Painted prior to 1930. One of my early paintings of a subject matter I often used from my first studio Redgate which burned. A large one 36 x 40 [sic] of the same subject, or similar subject (but reversed) which I called Winter Pool. Mr. and Mrs. Robert T Lee of Manchester, Vt. own a larger panel of the same subject matter."
The "sic" added to the diary comment above is because Woodward mistook 36" x 42" for 36" x 40". We have no examples of the artist making a 36" x 40" canvas. We also confirmed the size of Winter Pool to 42 inches wide. There is so much confusion surrounding Winter Pool, it borders on farcical. There is no mention of Winter Pool's parent, Winter Silence, which hung along with this page's painting parent, Evening Stream #2. Can we even call it its "parent" when he attributes its lineage to Winter Pool?
Weirder yet, Winter Silence, is older than Winter Pool but not older
than Evening Stream #1 or Evening Stream #2. What came first, the chicken or the
egg? Getting crazier, Woodward claims this scene/subject is the REVERSE of the Silence/Pool pictures.
Woodward writes his painting diary in the 1940s and is doing so entirely from memory. We
have no evidence he fact checked his information to any of the numerous source material he had at
his disposal, including Scrapbooks and exhibit programs. As we fact-check him, we are finding more
errors than accurate information except when it comes to the owners/buyers of his paintings. He does
have a ledger in the Smithsonian that he may be working from but that has not been confirmed.
Woodward does not say why, after a few years he painted another version of this subject, although it may have to do with the Deerfield Inn wanting something to hang, perhaps, in its lobby or restaurant (if it had one). Still, it exhibited a number of times after it spend three year in the Inn during a time when the artist was pulling out of storage old canvases painted two decades prior of similar subject and "re-painting" them in his matured style and destroying the originals.
⮟ Below is a side-by-side comparison of Winter Pool and Evening Stream #2 with Evening Stream #2 reversed as Woodward indicates in his painting diary remarks. While there is a good resemblance of the two pools being similar, the rocks do not line up at all and they do not appear to be the same rocks at all. The scene is also different in the sense that Winter Pool is right after a fresh snow, branches and leaves of the surrounding Beech trees covered.