A bust-length ink portrait of a woman in three-quarter view, the gaze directed upward and to the right — the eyes lifted, the whites slightly visible below the irises, the expression caught between alertness and distraction. The hair is full and slightly bouffant, swept back from the face in a style that dates the drawing to a specific era. A small vertical mark above the brow is either a scar, a notation, or an ink accident that reads as a detail.
The ink line throughout is confident and slightly heavy, the outer contour of the face and hair described with the sketchbook's characteristic broad stroke. The nose in near-profile has a slight upward tilt; the lips are parted or barely closed, the expression not quite resolved. The neck below carries a few hatching strokes indicating shadow, and the garment below — a round neckline — is briefly sketched.
The upward glance creates an unusual spatial quality: the subject is looking at something above and behind the viewer, creating a triangulated space that the frontally gazing portraits do not have. Where the direct-gaze portraits place the viewer in the subject's line of sight, this one looks past us, into a space we cannot see.
The bouffant hair connects this portrait to a particular cultural moment — the late 1950s or early 1960s — and makes it one of the more dateable works in the sketchbook sequence. Sidney drew whoever was available; that availability has given the collection an inadvertent social record of the people around him across several decades.