The only infant portrait in the collection — and one of the most carefully drawn works in the portrait section. A baby's face seen full-frontal, the large eyes open and looking directly out with the wide, unfocused clarity of an infant's gaze, the round cheeks and small nose and lips rendered with the precise attention of someone who looked at this face often and with deep affection.
The pencil technique here is more detailed and more painstaking than in the adult portraits — the hair rendered strand by strand in fine parallel strokes sweeping from the center parting outward, the eyebrows suggested with the lightest crosshatching, the pupils drawn as small dark circles with highlights. This is a portrait drawn from sustained observation, not from a quick session.
Sidney noted the medium at lower right alongside his name: "Sidney Cothran / Pencil" — the only instance in the drawings where he specified the medium, suggesting he was thinking about how this would be received or catalogued, perhaps as a gift to the parents.
The crosshatch background — a plaid pattern of diagonal marks that surrounds the face — is unique in the portraits and serves as both a tonal foil for the face and a compositional frame. The plaid is Sidney's recurring vocabulary appearing in the most personal possible context: framing a child.
Whose child is this? Given the care of the drawing and the specificity of the notation, this is almost certainly someone very close to Sidney — a child he knew intimately. Whether family or friend remains unknown.