A seated back view in pencil — cross-legged on the floor, the head bowed forward, the hair falling down the right side of the face, the arms gathered in front at the lower body and partially visible at the left edge. This pose is closely related to Work 1438's sanguine seated back view: the same cross-legged floor sitting, the same back-presented approach, the same hair falling as the head bows. But where 1438 was in sanguine on white paper with the characteristic warm chalk line, this drawing is in pencil on white paper, and the pencil's cooler, finer mark produces a different quality of the same posture.
The pencil is applied here at a lighter hand than in the portrait works 1441 and 1445 — the lines thinner and more tentative, the body's outer contour drawn in a single spare pass with minimal tonal elaboration. Brief shadow marks appear at the lumbar region of the back where the spine's depression creates shadow, and at the shoulder blade area where the arms' gathered position creates a fold. The hair receives several overlapping pencil lines at the right side of the bowing head, its fall and weight indicated with more marks than any other zone of the composition.
The small format — 9.5"×12" — makes this the most compact figure drawing in the new portfolio sequence, the seated body fitting into a square-proportioned sheet rather than the elongated verticals or horizontals of the other figure formats. The compactness suits the pose: the seated cross-legged figure is inherently gathered and compact, the body folded into itself rather than extended, and the small paper respects this gathering. The lower margin clips the feet slightly, the body just barely fitting within the sheet's edges.
The pencil seated back, following the pencil portrait works of 1441 and 1445, suggests that Sidney was working through a pencil session that moved between portraits and figure studies — the same medium, different modes of observation. The connection between these pencil works (and the pen portraits of 1443 and 1444) constitutes a drawing session or series of sessions where fine-line media replaced the broader chalk strokes of the Color Pastel portfolios. The smaller format of 1447 also marks a new scale in the collection — more intimate, more notebook-like.