The most purely atmospheric work in the collection — and the most solitary. A vast near-white ground, barely touched by the faintest washes of pale gray and lavender, occupies almost the entire picture field. At the lower right, a single small figure stands in this emptiness: a person, barely described, rendered in a few dark marks with a suggestion of green above and around the head — perhaps foliage, perhaps hair, perhaps an abstract mark. The figure is small relative to the paper. The space around it is enormous.
The figure's presence transforms everything. Without it, this would be a study in atmospheric wash, a near-blank. With it, the empty space becomes loneliness, becomes distance, becomes the feeling of being one small thing in a very large world. Sidney understood the rhetoric of scale: place a figure in a vast ground and you have created an emotion.
Along the very bottom edge of the composition, a thin line of small marks — dots, brief marks in purple and red — suggests either vegetation at extreme distance or simply the marks of the pencil moving along the paper's edge. Above this line, the ground continues its pale emptiness upward to where the faintest cloud forms drift at the upper edge.
This is one of those works that is more felt than seen — the kind of image that does something to you before you have analyzed what you are looking at. The solitary figure in the vast pale space is one of Sidney's most directly emotional statements, and it is made almost entirely out of absence.