The most psychologically intense portrait in the ink series — a woman seen nearly frontally, her gaze directed at the viewer with an expression that combines wariness, defiance, and emotional weight. The brows are the most emphatically drawn in any ink portrait: heavy, furrowed slightly, making the eyes beneath them read as watching. The lips below are pressed together in a quality of contained feeling.
The hair — long, parted at the center, falling on both sides of the face — is the most architecturally framing in any frontal portrait: the two masses of hair create a vertical frame for the face, the face emerging from between them like a face at a window. The hair itself is drawn in long parallel strokes that give it weight and direction.
The body below — bare shoulders, the beginning of the arms at either side — is described in the boldest marks, the ink at its most physical and gestural. This physical energy in the body description contrasts with the stillness of the face above.
This portrait is one of a small group in the collection — the Woe (507), the Fierce Frontal Face (this work), the Contracted Figure (821) — in which emotional weight is the explicit subject, not just an incidental quality. Sidney was willing to draw suffering, wariness, and guarded pain without softening them.