A close-up ink drawing of a bovine face — a cow or bull, seen full-frontal, filling the composition from the broad brow at the top to the wide nostrils at the bottom. The eyes are set wide and low in the face, the pupils drawn as dense black marks ringed by ink hatching, the gaze carrying the particular flat patient attention of a large animal looking at something it does not fully understand.
The ink is applied with the same confident, somewhat blunt instrument as the portrait studies surrounding it in the sketchbook — a brush or wide-nibbed pen making marks that establish form quickly. The brow is broad and domed, marked with diagonal hatching strokes that suggest the roughness of the hide. The ears flare to either side, large and softly indicated. The nostrils below are drawn as a double arch of thick ink, the muzzle's soft bulk suggested beneath.
Placed within a sequence of human portrait heads, this animal face is startling — the same frontal head format suddenly applied to a non-human subject. The effect is disarming: the cow's gaze has the same directness and inscrutability as many of the human portraits, the flat frontal presentation reducing both to the same essential act of face-to-face encounter.
Sidney's animal subjects elsewhere in the collection — the cardinal (1340), the elephant (682), the cat creatures — tend toward the invented or the symbolic. This ink cow is the most purely observed, the most directly naturalistic. It belongs in the sketchbook sequence not as an anomaly but as Sidney simply drawing what was in front of him, as he always did.