A bust-length ink portrait of a young man with eyes fully closed — not sleeping, not blinking, but closed with the deliberateness of someone in thought or repose. The face is drawn from a slightly downward angle, the head tilting forward, the eyes shut with long emphatic lashes described in confident ink strokes. This is a portrait of interiority: a face that has turned away from the world by simply closing its eyes.
The ink line is the collection's most assertive portrait medium — every mark final, no erasure, no softening. Sidney uses it boldly here: thick hatching strokes build the shadow at the neck and the collar, while the face itself is left nearly bare, the white of the paper holding the cheek and brow. The collar and shirt below are described with the thick horizontal stripes of a collared shirt, specific and domestic.
The hair is drawn with parallel diagonal strokes across the crown — a simplified, almost diagrammatic treatment that gives the head its structure without attempting the strand-by-strand observation of the pencil portraits. The ink's directness suits this shorthand; the face is the subject, not the hair.
This work must be considered alongside its companion, Work 1344 — the two ink portraits share the same small format paper and almost certainly the same session. Work 1344 is confirmed as a self-portrait; where Sidney drew himself with eyes open and watchful, here he drew his own face with eyes closed, turned entirely inward. The pair is Sidney observing himself in two states. The pair together explore two states of the same encounter: the face looking out, and the face looking in.