A large-format pencil nude bust portrait — 22 by 33.75 inches — the most carefully observed and most sustained academic pencil study in the collection. The figure is in three-quarter left profile, the upper body presented from the waist up, the breasts fully described with attention to form and volume. The face is the most elaborately drawn in the large-format pencil series: the sweeping hair described with broad parallel strokes, the eye with its lash and iris fully described, the brow's specific curve, the nose in three-quarter, the lips. The tonal development at the cheek and below the jaw gives the face a three-dimensionality absent from the more minimal pencil works.
The large format — 22 by 33.75 inches — gives the figure and face a scale that approaches life-size or exceeds it for the head. At this scale, the pencil marks must be large enough to read from a distance while specific enough to describe individual features. Sidney achieves this with marks that are proportionally scaled to the format: the hair strokes broad, the eye marks specific, the tonal zones built from wider hatching than the smaller-format works require.
This large-format nude bust portrait sits in a long tradition of academic life drawing at scale — the study made to understand the body and the face as three-dimensional forms, the large paper giving both the artist and the viewer time with the subject. Among all the figure and portrait drawings in the collection, this is the most fully in the classical academic tradition: the large sheet, the sustained observation, the integration of the nude torso with the observed face.