One of the most formally original and visually delightful works in the collection — a large horizontal watercolor in which three groups of individual stones or pebbles are arranged in horizontal bands against a pale ground, each stone painted individually with its own color, size, and shape. This is both an observational still life and a formal composition: Sidney must have collected actual stones, arranged them, and then painted them with the same botanical specificity he brought to plants and animals.
The stones are the technical achievement. Each one is individually outlined in black and filled with its own wash — pale pink, lavender, gray, orange, yellow, green, ochre, cream — and each carries a small highlight mark that gives it roundness and weight. No two stones are the same. The variety within the formal constraint of stone-shape is extraordinary: flat oval stones, rounder thicker ones, elongated ones, stacked pairs. Looking at this work closely is like crouching at the edge of a stream and examining what the water has made over time.
The three bands recede naturally in the composition: the largest and most varied stones in the foreground band, a middle distance band of smaller stones, and a far band so reduced it reads as a dotted line at the horizon. Between the bands, the pale watercolor ground suggests water or light-colored soil.
At upper center, the faintest suggestion of a distant landscape — a thin green horizon line with tiny bird marks — grounds the composition in an outdoor setting, a beach or streambed. The signed name at lower right — "Sidney Cothran" — is written with unusual formality, suggesting Sidney considered this a significant work.