The most systematically unusual work in the entire collection — and one of the most visually surprising. The composition consists entirely of small vertical rectangular marks — brush strokes of uniform width and varying height — arranged in horizontal rows across the white ground. Each mark is a single color; no mark contains more than one. The colors span the full spectrum and beyond: yellows, greens, blues, oranges, reds, browns, teals, grays, pinks, and purples — in no predictable sequence, no repeating pattern, no apparent systematic order.
The rows themselves are not perfectly straight but gently undulating, as if Sidney painted them freehand without a ruler — the rows curve slightly upward and downward across the width of the paper, giving the rigid geometric subject matter an organic quality. The marks within each row are not perfectly spaced but slightly varied in the gaps between them, adding a further note of handmade irregularity.
What is this? It could be a color mixing study — Sidney testing how his watercolors behave. It could be a formal experiment in color relationships — how does orange look beside gray? beside teal? beside dark green? It could be something else entirely — a musical score, a linguistic system, a private notation. The title suggests the color chart reading, which honors both the systematic quality and the painting's status as an aesthetic object in its own right.
Whatever its origin, the work reads as a painting, not a study. The careful handmade quality of each mark, the overall visual rhythm of the rows, the color relationships that emerge between adjacent and nearby marks — these are not accidents but decisions, or at least observations that Sidney found worth keeping. This is the most conceptually distinct object in the collection.