The most reduced and the most purely linear of the ink portraits — a face that barely coheres into a portrait, the marks so light and so few that the face seems to be assembling itself from the paper rather than being drawn onto it. The curly hair at the crown is the most substantial element: multiple overlapping marks building the volume of the curls. Below it, the face dissolves: the brow line, the eye barely indicated, the nose a single curve, the lips a brief horizontal. The body below is almost entirely absent — two or three marks establishing the shoulder and collar, then nothing.
This extreme economy has two possible readings: either Sidney began a portrait and did not complete it, or this IS the completed portrait — the most reduced expression of the face possible while still being a face. Given how many of Sidney's most daring works are also his most reduced (the Ghost Figure, Three Color Marks, Almost Nothing), the second reading is more consistent with his practice.
The curly hair is treated with the same spiral-loop marks Sidney used throughout the collection for curly hair — each curl a small loop, the overall mass built from dozens of them. The hair is real; the face below it is a question.
This portrait asks: what is the minimum needed to suggest a human face? The answer here: a mass of curls and five marks below.