The most atmospheric and the most technically restrained of all the landscape watercolors — a work that is primarily about weather rather than place. The composition is almost entirely sky and atmosphere: pale blue-gray washes descend from the upper portion in vertical streaks that read unmistakably as rain — the wet, dragging technique that lets the watercolor run downward in the natural pattern of precipitation. This rain fills the middle two-thirds of the composition, obscuring distance, dissolving form.
At the very bottom, emerging from the mist at the painting's lower edge, a line of dark green trees — firs or pines — rendered with small confident marks in deep green-black. They are specific trees, not generic vegetation: each has the characteristic silhouette of a conifer, the triangular shape of a pine, the rounded mass of a deciduous tree mixed in. Their darkness against the pale atmospheric rain makes them feel especially solid and present.
At the far right of the tree line, just visible, a thin horizontal stroke of orange-red — a reflection of light off water, or a distant colored element — is the only warm note in an otherwise cool composition. It acts as a counterweight, a small warmth in the general grey.
The sky at top transitions from the pale cool blue of the rain zone to something slightly warmer and more golden at the upper corners — the suggestion of sun beyond the rain, of the kind of light that makes a rainy day beautiful rather than merely grey.
This is the most English of Sidney's landscapes — it feels like the Lake District or the Scottish Highlands, the soft rain of the northern world. It is also among his most technically pure: almost nothing but washes, the medium doing what watercolor does best.