The only oil painting in the collection — a signed fruit still life on canvas, 30.75 by 34.25 inches, the most technically ambitious and most formally complete single work in the entire archive after the self-portraits. On a blue-teal table surface, several objects are arranged: at the left, a crumpled yellow cloth or paper; center-left, a lemon; next to it a red apple; behind these objects, a large amber glass jar with a curved straw or stick rising from its mouth; to the right, a clear glass bottle; at the far right, a smaller amber bottle. Below the table at the front edge, a single orange-red carrot lies casually. The background is a warm yellow field with vertical color zones suggesting architectural elements — panels, columns, or curtains — in yellow, pale green, and grey-purple.
The oil medium gives this still life qualities unavailable in any other work in the collection: the opacity of oil paint, the ability to layer color on color, the capacity to describe the transparency of glass and the opacity of ceramic in a single composition. The amber jar at the center is the most technically demanding object — its transparency, the warm amber color, the curved object inside — and it is described with a confidence that comes from comfort with the medium. The composition overall has the quality of a painter at work, the arrangement deliberate, the light considered.
The signature at the lower right — the full signature, Cothran — appears on a painting as well as on the photograph and the scratchboard, confirming the range of media in which Sidney claimed his work formally. The carrot at the bottom edge is the composition's most casual and most charming detail: not placed with still-life formality but lying there as if it just arrived, its orange warmth against the blue table a final compositional gift. Among all the works in the collection, this oil painting most clearly reveals Sidney's capacity as a trained and committed visual artist.