A watercolor of sky at full summer abundance — the most chromatically warm of the big-sky compositions, the blue-white base suffused with yellow-gold, green, and teal cloud forms that read as a late afternoon sky before rain or after. The upper portion is dominated by a great loose cloud mass painted with free wet-into-wet technique — blue at the edges, yellow-gold and teal at the billowing centers, white where the paper shows through the lightest passages.
Below this spectacular sky, a thin strip of landscape occupies the lowest quarter of the composition: green hills with the characteristic dotted tree marks, several farm buildings with pink-red roofs visible through the foliage, the miniature detail of an inhabited country scene. Sidney observes the sky and barely notes the earth beneath it — it is the light and air that command his attention.
The sky handling here is among the most technically accomplished in the collection: multiple successive washes, each allowed to dry partially before the next is added, creating depth and luminosity through layering rather than through single-pass coverage. The greens in the cloud forms are particularly unusual — not the blue-gray of a storm sky but a vivid teal-green that suggests something between atmosphere and vegetation, as if the sky itself has learned to grow.
Small dark bird marks in the middle sky zone add the characteristic small-life detail. Without them the sky would be weather; with them it is a specific afternoon at a specific place.