A close-cropped frontal portrait of a woman with vivid red-gold hair, rendered in color pastel on canvas with a chromatic boldness that places it firmly in Sidney's painted figurative tradition. The face is seen nearly full frontal, slightly tilted, the eyes closed or nearly so — giving the subject an expression of inwardness, of private thought, that contrasts with the extroverted warmth of the surrounding color.
The hair is the dominant visual element: a mass of orange-gold and amber, rendered in the same warm tonality as the Bacchus and Venus figures, its color spreading outward and blending into the background at the edges so that the distinction between figure and ground softens into chromatic relationship. The background itself is not neutral but active — warm pink at left, yellow-green at right — surrounding the figure in color rather than space.
The face is rendered with a technique unusual for Sidney: color applied in multiple overlapping patches rather than the single confident stroke of his oil paintings. The skin is simultaneously yellow-ochre, pink, and teal-blue — the same multi-hued skin treatment visible in the Blue Man and the Bacchus figure. The red lip is the most precisely placed mark in the work.
The blue blouse at the bottom provides a grounding note of cool color against all the warm orange and gold above. The signed name — Sidney T. Cothran Jr. — in the lower right is written in a slightly formal hand that suggests this was a considered and completed work.
This is a portrait of someone known to Sidney — the specificity of the face, the warmth of the color, the closeness of the cropping all suggest someone he looked at often and with care.