The Pool was published as part of the Thames Set in 1871. It depicts the pool at Wapping, part of the port below London Bridge where ocean-going vessels docked and were unloaded. Together with Black Lion Wharf (Kennedy 42) and Eagle Wharf (Kennedy 41) The Pool is among a group of similar compositions that are probably among the major and most dramatic of the Thames prints. Each has a "lighter" man positioned in the immediate foreground. Here, he looks out at the viewer. Behind him, the lighters filled with coal in the middle-ground lead the eye to the docks in the distance.

“While the composition appears to recede, it also reads as a flat two-dimensional pattern, and hangs in a tense and delicate balance between the two and three dimensions;” it also betrays the influence of Japanese ukiyo-e prints (Katherine Lochnan, The Etchings of James McNeill Whistler, p. 87).

The previous owner of this impression, Samuel Harrington, was a well-known critic, colleague of Whistler and author of a catalogue raisonné of the etchings of Seymour Haden (Whistler's brother-in-law). Harrington's collection of Whistler prints was quite exceptional.