A large color pastel portrait — the most ambitious portrait in terms of tonal and coloristic complexity. A man's face seen in slight three-quarter view, the gaze directed upward and to the left with an expression of intensity and aspiration. The face is modeled in multiple colors simultaneously: pink and salmon at the cheeks and brow, brown and ochre in the shadow zones, green at the hairline and in the beard area, yellow-green at the upper cranium. This multi-color skin treatment is the same approach used for the Bacchus and Venus figures in the oil paintings — Sidney using color to model form rather than tone.
The inscription at lower right — very small — may read "Self?" alongside the full signature "Sidney T. Cothran Jr." — which would make this a third self-portrait to add to the confirmed ink self-portraits 523 and 527. The features are consistent with the other self-portraits: the mustache, the beard, the shape of the nose and brow. But the identification is tentative.
If this is indeed a self-portrait, it is the only one in color and the only one that shows Sidney looking upward — the most aspirational of the three, the face oriented toward something above and ahead rather than directly into the mirror. The two ink self-portraits look at the viewer; this one looks toward something beyond the viewer.
The pastel technique is the most sustained and most worked of any portrait in the collection — multiple layers building the face's color complexity, the surface fully engaged across its entire extent.