The most narrative and the most intimate of the five house paintings — the works Sidney chose to live with. A small figure, seen from behind, sits alone at an orange-red picnic table in a sunlit clearing. The trees that frame the scene rise at left and center, their trunks rendered in warm ochre and cool green-gray. The figure is tiny relative to the space — perhaps a third of the canvas height — which gives the scene an enormous sense of quiet and solitude. He appears to be writing or drawing: bent slightly forward, one arm on the table.
The dappled light on the ground is the painting's most technically accomplished passage: pools of warm yellow-gold alternating with cool blue-green shadow, suggesting late afternoon light filtering through leaves. The bottom right corner holds a remarkable and inexplicable element: what appears to be a standing meerkat or ground squirrel, painted with the same matter-of-fact directness as the trees and the figure. It is not explained; it does not need to be.
The overall palette is the palest and most delicate in the painted collection: soft teal-green, warm cream-white, golden yellow, with the orange-red table as the only saturated note. It is a painting about solitude chosen freely — about the pleasure of being alone with work, in nature, in good light. The fact that Sidney hung this suggests he recognized something personally true in the scene. The suggested title, The Writer, honors what the figure appears to be doing — and perhaps who Sidney understood himself to be.