A large, elegant ink portrait — a woman seen in slight three-quarter profile, her head tilted downward so the gaze falls below the picture's lower edge, her expression one of absorbed concentration. The hat — another flat cap or beret — sits high on the head, its geometric form contrasting with the organic forms of the face and hair below. This is the second hatted portrait in the ink series (alongside 642, Windblown) and demonstrates that Sidney was drawn to the compositional possibilities of headwear as a formal element.
The ink technique is among the most confident in the portrait series: the face described in perhaps a dozen marks — the brow, the eye, the nose's shadow, the lips, the chin. Each mark is exactly placed. The hat is described in five strokes. The hair below the hat is three or four sweeping arcs. The body below is four lines.
The economic confidence — the artist knowing exactly what to include and what to leave out — gives this portrait a quality of inevitability. Sidney had drawn enough faces to know which marks were necessary and which were not. He left out the unnecessary ones.
Signed "Sidney Cothran" at lower right in a small, neat hand — the full surname without the Jr., suggesting this is from a period when he was still establishing his practice.