The most explicitly grotesque work in the collection — and one of the most visually powerful. A large face or mask fills the picture field, seen nearly frontally: two wild staring eyes with dark pupils and green irises, a broad red nose, yellow cheeks, and a vast open mouth that reveals large individual teeth. The expression is somewhere between laughter and terror, between carnival and nightmare. This is not a portrait but a mask — a theatrical face, a commedia dell'arte persona, a face designed to be seen from a distance and to provoke a reaction.
The hat or headdress at the top is elaborate: layers of pink, orange, and teal with a small creature or ornament perched at the top right — one of Sidney's characteristic small biological forms, complete with eyes and body, inhabiting the headpiece. The whole upper portion reads as a costume, an elaborate performance apparatus crowning the raw expressiveness of the face below.
The pastel technique is at its most physical here — the color applied with real pressure, the marks dense and overlapping, the surface worked and reworked in a way that suggests Sidney returning to this face repeatedly. The yellow cheeks and the gray-green mouth interior carry the marks of many layers, the final surface built up from a history of marks.
The bottom of the composition is occupied by a zone of small cursive marks — spiral-like, closely spaced — that read as either text, or grass, or pure mark-making. They form a kind of plinth for the face, a ground from which the mask emerges.
This face appears nowhere else in the collection. It is a singular image — surprising, slightly disturbing, impossible to categorize with the other works.