The most spacious and sky-dominated of all the landscape watercolors — a composition in which sky occupies roughly three-quarters of the picture field, the earth reduced to a thin inhabited band at the bottom. This radical vertical distribution — sky overwhelming earth — creates the feeling of standing in flat open country where the sky really does take over the world.
The sky is built in multiple wet washes that create depth: a nearly white luminous center rises from the horizon, flanked by clouds in blue and lavender-pink, with deeper blues at the upper corners. The central cloud mass has an orange-pink warmth at its heart — afternoon light catching the inside of a cumulus — that is the most precisely observed meteorological moment in the landscape series. This is a specific cloud at a specific time of day, not a generic sky.
The land below is handled with wonderful concision: a thin strip of green-yellow fields at middle-distance, with dots of dark green for trees; in the immediate foreground, a warm orange-tan field with scattered trees and small dark marks suggesting vegetation or figures; at the far left and right, the land curves slightly as if the horizon itself is visible. The scale of the trees — tiny against the vast sky — establishes the experience of the flat landscape precisely.
A low mesa or butte at center-right — pink and green, modest in scale — is the only topographic feature of note. Everything else is flat, open, overwhelmed by sky. This could be the Great Plains, could be the Midwest, could be southern France. It has the quality of a place remembered rather than painted on location — the sky too large, the earth too small, the proportion of a landscape that stays in the body.