A pencil portrait with an extraordinary domestic detail — a woman in three-quarter view holding a cigarette at the lower right of the composition, and below the cigarette, what appears to be a cat: loose marks indicating the rounded head and the body of an animal held or resting at her side. This is the only portrait in the collection with both a prop (the cigarette) and a companion animal.
The face is described with confident pencil tonal work: the brow, the eye with shadow, the nose, the lips, the chin. The hair is voluminous — large curling masses on both sides of the face, described with many overlapping loop marks. The expression carries a quality of quiet self-possession, the eyes directed slightly sideways.
The cigarette at the lower right is drawn with specific detail: the tapered cylinder, the lit end, the gentle smoke implied. The smoking figure in a portrait is a long tradition in Western art — Lautrec, Vallotton, Degas — and Sidney places himself in that tradition with complete naturalness.
The cat below the cigarette — if that is indeed what the marks describe — is the collection's only companion animal in a portrait. The casual domesticity of the scene (a woman, her cigarette, her cat) is entirely unique in Sidney's portrait practice.