The most intimate and most technically refined portrait in the batch — a young woman in left profile, the eyes closed with the lashes specifically rendered as a dense fan from the upper lid, the nose in profile with its particular uptilt described with care, the lips slightly parted below. The hand is visible at the chin — the fingers curling upward against the jaw in a thoughtful or self-touching gesture, the fingernails briefly indicated. A scarf or collar at the throat is described with parallel marks indicating fabric folds. The sanguine chalk is applied here with the most sustained observation in any chalk portrait in the new portfolio: the face is not just indicated but genuinely described, each feature given its specific form.
The red chalk on white paper gives the closed-eye profile a warmth that connects it to the earliest figure drawing tradition in the collection while the portrait's intimacy places it firmly in the sustained portrait practice of the later batches. The eyes closed — the lashes described with the same specific attention Sidney gave to lashes in the pen portraits (Works 1443, 1451, 1503) — give the face a quality of private absorption: a person observed in a moment of inwardness, the chalk's warmth lending the observation tenderness.
The hand at the chin is the portrait's most humanizing detail: a face absorbed, a hand touching itself lightly, the gesture connecting face to self in a way that makes the portrait feel genuinely intimate rather than observed from a distance. Among all the sanguine chalk portraits in the new portfolio — where the medium has appeared primarily in figure drawings — this is the most concentrated and the most sustained portrait use of the sanguine, the medium's warmth serving the face's inwardness with complete coherence.