A bold ink portrait of unusual compositional invention — a child wearing a banded hat, drawn with Sidney's most energetic ink vocabulary, surrounded by a floating field of circles of varying sizes. The circles — scattered across the background in pencil, lighter than the ink figure — range from small to large, some with spiraling centers, some simple outlines. They are the most explicit appearance of Sidney's circle vocabulary in any portrait context: the concentric rings and bubbles that populate the abstract works here appearing as the environment of a child's face.
The child's face is the most specifically observed child portrait since the baby portrait (647) — but where that drawing was painstaking pencil observation, this is bold ink expression. The eyes are large and slightly wide, drawn with the exaggerated emphasis of someone who understood that children's eyes take up proportionally more of the face than adults'. The nose and mouth below are described with fewer marks, the emphasis unmistakably on the eyes.
At the lower center, a small flower mark — a delicate contrast to the bold ink figure above. At lower right, a small looping mark that may be the beginning of a heart form or simply an abstract mark. These small additions at the bottom give the composition a gentle domesticity that the bold ink face above doesn't have on its own.
The signature at lower center — small, abbreviated — confirms this as a completed work Sidney valued. The circles as background environment for a child's face is the most personally integrated combination of Sidney's formal and observational practices.