An even more reduced composition than 777 — a large horizontal sheet with five or six small color events distributed sparsely across a near-white ground. The marks are paler and more tentative than in 777: yellow splashes, a pink-mauve form, pale yellow-gold shapes, a dark crimson drop, pale brown-gray washes. None has the saturated confidence of the three marks in 777; these are quieter, more hesitant, as if Sidney was testing the colors before committing to them.
At the upper left, a single tiny bird in dark ink — barely four marks, the most abbreviated creature in the collection — is the only mark that is fully resolved. Everything else on the sheet is provisional; the bird is definitive.
The composition has the quality of a page still becoming itself — marks made, space between them considered, the final decision not yet reached. In another context this might be dismissed as an unfinished sketch. But Sidney kept it, and its incompleteness is its character: this is a sheet on which something was beginning.
The relationship between 777 and 780 is instructive: both use the same principle (few marks, vast white, a small bird), but 777 has arrived at its conclusion while 780 is still in process. Together they show the same sensibility at two different moments of development.