A near-frontal standing figure on a warm tan paper — lighter than the ochre of 1416 but warmer than the white papers of the earlier portfolio works — in which the face is entirely concealed by an extraordinary mass of loose hair that falls forward from the crown and cascades over the face and down past the shoulders. The hair is the composition's dominant element: more marks devoted to it than to any other zone, the individual strands described in overlapping arcs and diagonals that create a dense, asymmetric curtain obscuring everything above the clavicle. Below, the body is drawn with the characteristic single-contour economy, the torso barely turned to the right, the belly button a small mark at the composition's center, the arms relaxed at the sides.
The sanguine on the tan ground reads with the same warmth as Work 1416, the figure and field in the same color family. The hair's treatment — multiple overlapping lines, no single clean stroke — is the most complex mark-making in the figure in this format, a deliberate density that stands in strong contrast to the body's spare outer contour below. This contrast between elaborated hair and minimized body has appeared in earlier figure drawings (1099, 1111, 1221), but the hair-curtain as total face-concealer is more extreme here than in any previous work.
The concealed face recurs as a motif across the new portfolio: Work 1403 (face resting on arms), 1405 (head bowed and hair falling forward), 1407 (face barely indicated), and now 1417, where the hair becomes the literal and complete barrier between viewer and model. The pattern suggests something intentional — either a consistent tendency in how these models posed, or a deliberate choice by Sidney to explore the figure without the face's psychological pressure. In 1417, the hair curtain transforms the figure into something between a person and an abstraction: fully present as a body, entirely absent as a face.
The 8.75"×21" format shared with Work 1416 makes a natural pairing: the preceding back view in which the face is simply absent by orientation, and this frontal view in which the face is present but concealed. Together they constitute two approaches to the same formal problem — the figure as form rather than person. On the tan paper with the sanguine's warmth, both drawings achieve a tonal intimacy that the cooler white-paper works do not.