A monotype portrait — a unique print impression pulled from a painted or inked plate — and one of the most technically unusual works in the collection. The face emerges from the cream paper in warm brown-red marks that have the characteristic quality of monotype: the image reversed in the transfer, the ink slightly spread and bloomed at the edges of each mark, the surface textured by the pressure of transfer in a way no direct drawing achieves. There is also a second red color — brighter, more saturated — visible at the lower edge and right side, suggesting a second pass or a second color applied.
The face itself is barely coherent — the features dissolved into clusters of marks that the viewer's eye assembles into a face rather than directly reads as one. The hair is a scattered field of marks at the top. The eyes are dark pools, the nose a central cluster, the mouth a horizontal smear. The neck and shoulders below are even more dissolved, the figure almost liquefying into the warm ground.
This ghostly quality is monotype's great contribution: it makes the image feel simultaneously present and vanishing, caught in the moment of its own disappearance. The portrait has a quality of memory rather than observation — this is what a face looks like when you close your eyes and try to hold it.
Whether Sidney pulled this impression himself or this is a print from elsewhere in his practice is unclear. Its relationship to the Color Streams work (559) — the other work with printing-process qualities — suggests Sidney experimented with multiple print techniques beyond the confirmed woodcuts.