A large-format pencil portrait signed Julie Slaymaker 1965 — the only work in the collection not made by Sidney T. Cothran Jr. The subject is identified in the CSV as Dad, meaning this is a portrait of Sidney's father drawn by someone named Julie Slaymaker, possibly a family member, a friend, or a fellow student. The figure stands in left profile, the face in three-quarter view with the gaze directed to the right and downward. A t-shirt is visible above the belt at the lower portion. The hands are partially indicated. The drawing is accomplished and confident — not a beginner's work, but a skilled observational portrait in the academic tradition.
The presence of this portrait in the Cothran collection raises immediate biographical questions. Who is Julie Slaymaker? The 1965 date places this in the mid-1960s, near or slightly before the date on Work 1565 (the child's drawing from 1967). The subject — Sidney's father — is someone the collection has not yet directly shown us, though Work 1622 appears to depict the same individual. The father's face in left profile, the heavy build, the simple clothing: these are consistent details across both works that feature him.
The inclusion of a work by another artist in the collection may indicate that Sidney valued this portrait of his father enough to keep it, that it was made for or given to the family, or that it was simply stored with the rest of the collection. Whatever its path into the archive, it is the collection's most significant contextual document: a portrait of the artist's father, made by a named other person, dated and placed in a specific moment of the family's life.