One of the most visually arresting landscape works in the collection — a composition of maximum contrast between the lower and upper registers. In the lower half, a large gnarled olive-like tree is rendered with exceptional specificity: the trunk divided into multiple thick branches that twist and interweave, each branch surface described with individual ink marks — tiny V-shaped leaf marks along each limb that give the tree a texture of bristling life. This is the most detailed and the most naturalistically described tree in all of Sidney's landscape work, approached with the same sustained attention he gave to the pebble arrangements and the elephant.
Above the tree, the sky is an almost shocking contrast: horizontal bands of pure color in the full spectrum — orange-red at the top, then blue, then yellow, then vivid green — each band a saturated watercolor wash applied without modulation, the colors meeting in soft edges that allow slight blending. This is a rainbow sky, but not a naturalistic rainbow arc — instead, the spectrum is laid flat in horizontal bands, as if the light itself has been sorted into its component colors.
The relationship between the two registers is the work's essential tension: the specific and observed (the gnarled tree, rendered mark by mark) beneath the abstract and chromatic (the spectrum sky, band by band). The tree is rooted in careful looking; the sky is rooted in systematic color. They share the same picture without resolution.
A gold border marks all four edges — Sidney's characteristic self-framing, giving the work the quality of an illuminated manuscript or a devotional image.