The third confirmed copy-after-a-master — and the most surprising. The inscription at lower right reads "After Gauguin's / 'Reverie'" — identifying the source as one of Paul Gauguin's figure paintings. Gauguin's "Reverie" (known in English as "The Brooding Woman" or "Te faaturuma") from 1891 depicts a Tahitian woman seated, her head bowed in melancholy thought. Sidney drew this figure in pencil with particular attention to the face and hair.
The face — seen in three-quarter view, tilted forward so the gaze falls below and to the left — has a quality of profound inwardness. The brow, the downcast eye, the slight compression of the lips all capture the original's meditative sorrow without reproducing it photographically. Sidney interpreted rather than copied: the marks are unmistakably his own — the hair described in the long parallel pencil strokes of his portrait practice, the ear given the full Cothran attention.
The upper right portion of the drawing shows a separate element — loose hatching lines that may be the beginning of a second study or simply marks from another session on the same paper.
With Barlach (Expressionism), Renoir (Impressionism), and now Gauguin (Post-Impressionism), Sidney's copying practice spans the full arc of late 19th-century European art. Gauguin adds the Symbolist and Pacific dimension — the melancholy, the otherness, the spiritual weight that Gauguin brought to Western art from Tahiti. This influence may be visible in the quieter, more inward works throughout the collection.