A standing male nude, full length, three-quarter view, rendered in Sidney's characteristic golden skin tones against a luminous teal-green background with passages of blue and lavender. The figure is strongly modeled — the musculature of the torso, the weight distribution in the legs — yet the paint handling is loose and gestural enough that it never becomes academic.
The defining compositional element is the right arm: extended upward and outward at shoulder height, the hand relaxed with fingers slightly spread, pointing into undefined space. The gesture is ambiguous — it could be beckoning, indicating, or simply suspended in a moment of transition. The face, in three-quarter profile, carries an expression of concentrated waiting or listening.
Beneath the figure, the ground becomes water: loosely painted rippling forms in blue, white, and yellow that suggest the figure standing at the edge of or within a body of water. The given title, Bacchus Awaiting Venus, frames this as mythological — and the gesture reads differently once you know the title, becoming clearly an invitation or a summoning. Sidney's confident handling of the male nude here is notable; this is not a figure study but a conceived, titled work with a specific narrative intention.