A large horizontal watercolor with a title inscribed at the lower margin — the inscription appears to read "Middle Agony" though the handwriting is small. The title is surprising and suggests an emotional context for what is otherwise Sidney's most exuberant creature work: a sky-scape populated with flying creatures of extraordinary variety, all rendered against a spectacular sky of yellow, teal, blue, pink, and purple.
The sky itself is the painting's ground — not air or atmosphere but a full color event, the kind of sky that exists in dreams or in the moment just before a storm transforms into something else. Multiple overlapping washes of yellow-green, blue, pink, lavender, and teal create a sky that is simultaneously stormy and luminous, threatening and beautiful. Against this sky, the creatures fly in all directions.
The creatures are Sidney's most various: at upper left, a sleek gray fish-form with detailed fins; at center upper, blue elongated forms somewhere between fish and eel; at right, a large multi-colored fish with visible scales and eye, the most conventionally depicted; at left middle, a brown bat or dragonfly with visible wing structure; throughout the lower zone, smaller forms — some barely suggested — complete the aerial population.
If the title is indeed "Middle Agony," it suggests something personal, something happening in the middle of a life, rendered not as dark imagery but as this wild flying world — the agony transformed into flight, into color, into creatures that do not belong in the sky but are there nonetheless. This is Sidney's most emotionally ambiguous title and one of his most formally joyful compositions.