A pencil drawing of a baby or young child figure, executed in the naive style of a child: the round bald or short-haired head atop a cylindrical torso, both arms suggested as simple curves, the eyes as large rounded ovals with smaller circles inside, the nose as a small rounded shape, the mouth as a curved line showing teeth — the drawing language of a child's representation of a person rather than an artist's observational study. The date 1-7-67 is written in pencil or ink at the upper right corner. The work is titled Br in the CSV and is marked as signed.
If the date 1-7-67 is January 7, 1967, this work provides the most specific biographical anchor point in the entire collection. Sidney T. Cothran Jr. would have been a young child on that date, and the drawing's naive style — the large round eyes, the simple cylindrical torso, the teeth-showing smile — is entirely consistent with a child's drawing. The title Br may stand for Brother, suggesting the figure depicted is a sibling — possibly Volney, if the family had a younger or older brother — making this a portrait within the portrait-making practice, but made by the child Sidney rather than the adult artist Sidney.
The presence of this child's drawing in the collection alongside the sophisticated adult figure studies, portraits, photographs, and stencils is deeply moving and biographically significant. It suggests that Sidney T. Cothran Jr. was drawing from a very young age — that the artistic impulse that produced hundreds of sophisticated works across multiple media was present and already being expressed in childhood. The naive style of this drawing and the polished technique of the large ink portraits are separated by decades of practice, but both are expressions of the same fundamental drive to put marks on paper that record a human being.
This work should be reproduced in any book on the collection, not for its technical merits (which are those of a child, not an artist) but for its biographical and emotional content: the earliest date in the collection, the artist as a child, the practice beginning.