A horizontal landscape painted with maximum exuberance — the most joyful of all the observational works. The sun dominates the upper right: a large, blazing form in orange-yellow with radiating arms that reach across a third of the sky, its character somewhere between observed solar phenomenon and the stylized sun-form of The Living Earth (112). This sun is not subtle. It announces itself.
The sky around it is active and colorful: loose blue cloud forms float to the left, orange-yellow marks suggest light diffusing through atmosphere, and the whole upper half of the painting reads as a sky in motion, caught at the most dynamic moment of a summer afternoon.
Below, the landscape is handled with delightful specificity: a rolling green field in the middle distance, a row of round-topped trees rendered as dark green dome shapes, and in the foreground two zones of vegetation — at lower left, a mass of small upright marks like a field of tall grass or grain, and at lower right, a small isolated tree that echoes the larger forms behind it. Small dark marks at the right horizon — possibly figures or fence posts — place a human scale in the far distance.
The horizontal format is not Sidney's natural orientation, and he uses it here to spread the landscape wide, to let the sun's energy radiate across the full width of the paper. The composition is simple and direct — sky above, earth below, sun blazing — and in that simplicity it achieves a kind of unambiguous happiness that is relatively rare in Sidney's work, which more often tends toward mystery or complexity. This is a painting made on a good day.