A frontal standing figure in pencil — both arms raised with the hands at the crown, the fingers gathering or arranging the hair — and the face below wearing what appears to be a smile: the lips curved upward at their corners, the expression open and warm. The smile is the rarest expression in the entire figure drawing collection. Among hundreds of faces drawn across the portfolios — neutral, inward, averted, downcast, searching — a smile is almost never present. Here it is, clearly: the lips curved, the overall expression of the face warm and slightly engaged. The face also shows the eyes briefly indicated and the nose in three-quarter view.
Below the figure, at the bottom margin of the 9.5"×18.75" sheet, a second study appears: a separate foot sketch, drawn independently below the main figure as if Sidney turned the paper over in his mind and drew the foot as a supplementary observation. The foot below and the smiling face above create an unusual compositional duality — the body studied at its two extremes (face and foot) on the same sheet, the figure between them.
The raised-arms hair-arranging gesture — both arms overhead, the elbows wide, the hands at the crown — gives the figure a quality of caught-in-private-moment: the model arranging her hair, not posing but doing something, the smile perhaps a response to noticing she was being observed. This candid quality is reinforced by the smile itself. Among all the figure drawings in the new portfolio, this is the most unguarded and the most humanly present in the sense of being caught rather than posed. The 9.5"×18.75" format — slightly shorter than the full 25" sheets — gives the figure slightly more white space at the bottom, the supplementary foot study filling that space.