A self-portrait in black ink — Sidney at a later or different moment than the blue ballpoint self-portrait of 1362, the beard now fuller, spreading from the mustache down through the chin and beginning to fill the jaw. The face is broader in this rendering, the ink applied with slightly more urgency, the marks building the face through a combination of clean outer contour and interior hatching at the beard and cheek shadow.
This is the sixth confirmed self-portrait in the collection (523, 527, 648, 1344, 1362, 1376), and it contributes something distinct to the sequence: where 1362 showed Sidney clean-shaven but for a mustache and goatee, looking at himself with a kind of careful dailiness, this drawing shows a face more grown-in, less groomed, the ink marks for the beard denser and more freely placed. The gaze is still direct — the self-observer's fundamental condition — but the expression carries a different quality, something between seriousness and weariness.
The head is bare — no shirt collar visible, the neck and upper chest indicated with just a few lines. This nakedness of the head without the usual garment detail gives the portrait an unusual directness; it is the face and the beard and almost nothing else, as if Sidney stripped away the contextual markers to look at himself more plainly.
Across the six self-portraits, Sidney drew himself at different ages, with different media, and in different emotional registers. The ink portraits (1344, 1362, 1376) form their own sub-group within the sequence — Sidney with a pen at a table, looking in a mirror, making a record of a specific face at a specific time.