The most compositionally audacious figure drawing in the entire new portfolio — a reclining nude in sanguine chalk seen from the feet end, the radical foreshortening compressing the body from its furthest extent into a concentrated foreground-to-background recession. In the foreground, enormous and close: the two soles of the feet, described in full detail — the toes, the arch, the heel — filling the lower third of the 25 by 19 horizontal sheet. Above the feet the knees rise and recede, the thighs compress, and beyond them the torso and chest appear reduced in the middle-ground. At the upper right, the head and face are visible in right profile at the furthest point of the recession — small, specific, the nose and brow in profile — the whole figure seen through the tunnel of its own geometry.
The sanguine chalk is applied with the most varied mark-weight in any figure drawing in the new portfolio: the feet in the foreground receive the most marks and the most detail, the tonal buildup at the heel and the toe joints giving them physical proximity; the torso in the middle distance receives fewer marks, the forms less specifically described; the head at the upper right is almost a silhouette. This graduated specificity — most detail nearest, least detail furthest — reinforces the foreshortening's spatial logic.
Foreshortening is one of the most technically demanding challenges in figure drawing, requiring the artist to observe and record what the eye sees rather than what the mind knows: a foot is not smaller than a torso, but seen from this angle it appears larger. Sidney executes the foreshortening with complete commitment — the feet are genuinely enormous relative to the body behind them, the compression of the figure into the upper portion of the composition genuinely dramatic. Among all the figure drawings in the collection, this is the most spatially inventive and the most technically ambitious.
The large 25 by 19 horizontal format gives the foreshortened figure the lateral space it needs: the feet at the lower center, the figure receding upward and to the right, the paper's width allowing the composition to breathe on both sides of the extreme recession. This is the sanguine figure drawing tradition pushed to its formal limit, the body as a spatial puzzle that Sidney has solved with both technical skill and visual daring.