The most reduced watercolor in the collection — a nearly empty 7.25 by 11 sheet on which four or five small wash marks float in the lower left and center: a rose-pink wash with yellow at the lower left, a yellow-green mark at upper right of that cluster, a yellow stroke at center, and smaller pink-and-yellow marks to the right. The upper two-thirds of the sheet is pure white, untouched. The marks scatter across the lower third of the composition, each one a brief encounter of wet color with paper — not planned, not architectural, simply placed.
The extreme reduction of this watercolor connects it to the minimalist tradition — Cy Twombly's casual marks, Helen Frankenthaler's open color fields — where the absence of marks is as intentional as their presence, the white paper an active participant in the composition rather than a neutral ground. Here the few warm marks at the lower portion of the sheet seem to drift rather than anchor, the white above them not emptiness but air.
In the context of a collection dominated by meticulous observational drawing, this minimal watercolor stands as the most radical departure: a work in which the artist has stepped back almost entirely, allowing a few casual marks to constitute the full statement. It follows directly from the complex abstract creature watercolors in this batch — as if after the density of 1602 and 1605, 1599 represents a breath taken, the most minimal possible version of the same impulse.