Sidney's own title is inscribed at the upper left: "Reflection" — and it is perfectly chosen. A woman's face, nearly frontal, loosely drawn in pencil with the kind of energetic mark-making that comes from rapid observation. The hair is wild and loose — short strokes radiating outward from the head, overlapping and crossing, giving the hair the same undirected energy it has in The Gaze (918). The face beneath the hair is described with fewer marks but more character: the eyes rendered with small ellipses and brief shadow marks, the nose as a simple curved form, the mouth barely indicated.
At upper right, behind and overlapping the figure, the suggestion of a window or architectural element — crossed lines, hatched areas — that gives the portrait a specific physical location: a person sitting in a room, near a window, caught in the act of reflection. Whether the title refers to the figure's mental state (she is thinking, reflecting) or to her physical situation (she is seen in a mirror, in a reflection) is ambiguous. Sidney may have chosen it for both meanings simultaneously.
The pencil work throughout has a warmth and freedom that suggests drawing from close observation at speed — this is not a posed portrait but a caught one, the hand moving quickly to record what the eye was seeing before it changed. The slightly smudged quality of some marks, the varying pressure, the looseness of the hair marks — all speak of drawing done live, in the moment.
The title and the signature together — "Reflection" at upper left, "Sidney Cothran" lower right — frame the face as if it is already a page in a book. Sidney was thinking about how this would be seen.