A large oil portrait — the most technically accomplished painted portrait in the collection and one of the finest paintings overall. A man seen in profile, head turned three-quarters away from the viewer so that only one eye is visible, looking to the right with an expression of absorbed attention. The face is modeled with Sidney's most nuanced color vocabulary: pink and salmon at the cheeks, ochre-gold at the brow and jaw, blue-green at the chin and temple, the multiple colors building a face of genuine three-dimensionality.
The hair is rendered in blue — the same bold color decision as in the Plaid Man (122) and the Bacchus figure — a vivid blue-teal that sweeps back from the brow in confident strokes. The collar and jacket below are barely suggested, a few strokes in pale blue-gray that frame the neck without competing with the face.
The background is the most restrained element: a pale gray-white that catches the canvas texture, giving the face the quality of emerging from light rather than from a painted ground. The canvas texture itself is visible throughout — Sidney painted thinly here, using the canvas as part of the image rather than filling it.
This is Sidney applying the same multi-hue skin modeling he used for Bacchus, Venus, and the color self-portrait (648) to a straightforward painted portrait. The result is the collection's most Fauvist work — the face described not in naturalistic flesh tones but in the full color palette.
The blue hair at the crown — painted with a single confident curl stroke — is the most memorable visual element and the mark that identifies this unmistakably as Sidney's hand.