The only landscape in the new portfolio sequence — and one of a very small number of landscapes in the entire Cothran collection — a horizontal drawing in what appears to be charcoal or soft black chalk on warm cream paper. The composition depicts a dramatic outdoor scene: a rocky mountain or cliff face at the left, its angular planes described with the sweeping tonal marks of the chalk; a curved dead or windswept tree at the upper left, its trunk bent and its branches reaching right in a single arching line; rolling fields or terraced hillsides in the middle ground described with dense parallel texture marks suggesting grass or crops; a large bushy tree at the upper right with its foliage described in characteristic broken marks; and in the foreground, a ravine or stream bed with the topographic marks of eroded earth. Two small birds in flight appear in the sky between the tree and the cliff.
The chalk or charcoal is applied with marks that differ fundamentally from the figure-drawing marks in the portfolio: where figure drawing uses outer contours to define form, landscape drawing uses directional marks to describe surface texture — the grass marks running diagonally across the hillside, the rock marks following the cliff face's planes, the foliage marks as irregular dots and strokes. This shift from contour to texture is the landscape mode's essential difference from the figure mode, and Sidney executes it with evident practice — the landscape does not feel like a first attempt.
The signature at lower right — the same brief initials seen on the Still Life (Work 1480) — confirms this as a deliberate, completed work rather than a study. The composition is ambitious: multiple landscape zones (foreground ravine, middle-ground fields, background cliff and trees, sky with birds) organized into a coherent spatial recession from lower-right to upper-left. The two birds add narrative specificity — a sky that contains life, a landscape that is inhabited.
This landscape, alongside Work 1480's still life, confirms that Sidney's artistic range extended well beyond the figure studies and portraits that dominate the portfolios. The figure drawing practice may have been the most sustained and the most productive, but it was not exclusive. The landscape represents a completely different relationship between artist and subject: not the live model in the studio but the open world seen from a specific place at a specific moment.