The only confirmed copy-after-another-artist in the entire collection — an important and revealing discovery. The inscription at lower left reads: "After Ernst Barlach 1922 / 'The Curse' / Litho" — Sidney acknowledging his source, identifying the work as a study after Ernst Barlach's 1922 lithograph of the same name.
Barlach was the great German Expressionist sculptor and printmaker whose figures of the poor, the suffering, and the spiritually burdened became defining images of Weimar-era German art. "The Curse" depicts a hunched, cloaked figure — elderly, struggling against some invisible weight, her whole body a statement of endurance and anguish. Sidney drew her with evident sympathy and technical discipline, rendering the flowing robes in long sustained pencil strokes and the hunched posture with careful structural understanding.
The figure occupies most of the tall narrow picture field — her cloaked head at the upper left, her body curving rightward and downward, her feet at the lower right in heavy banded footwear. The pencil work follows the flowing planes of the robes without laboring their detail, the marks suggesting fabric weight and movement through direction rather than texture.
This drawing tells us something important about Sidney's artistic formation: he studied the Expressionist masters, he engaged with the tradition of socially conscious figure drawing, and he drew with sufficient humility to acknowledge his sources. Ernst Barlach as a reference point also illuminates certain qualities in Sidney's own figure work — the weight, the psychological presence, the willingness to draw suffering without sentimentality.