A beautifully resolved landscape watercolor in which a young tree — its trunk slender and upright, its crown a cascade of yellow-gold and bright green leaves rendered in Sidney's most expressive tree-painting vocabulary — occupies the center of the composition against a luminous green-blue landscape ground. The tree is painted in the full light of high summer: the yellow leaves at the crown catching the light most intensely, the green leaves in shade below, the transition between them creating the tree's three-dimensionality.
The landscape behind the tree is rendered with unusual spatial depth: rolling green hills recede from the middle distance to a far treeline at the horizon, where a blue-white sky begins. The ground plane is described with multiple overlapping green and blue-green washes, their edges soft, the spatial recession convincing. At the bottom edge, an orange wire fence with wooden posts — rendered with the specificity of a real fence at a real place — closes the foreground and establishes the viewer's position: outside this field, looking in over the fence.
At the lower center, a small bird form — dark, briefly described, slightly ambiguous — perches at the fence or on the ground, its presence giving the composition its scale and its life. As in so many of Sidney's landscapes, the small living thing in the large natural space is the work's emotional center.
The combination of the vividly painted tree against the receding landscape is the finest single-tree landscape in the collection.