A large pencil portrait of exceptional hair observation — a woman seen in slight three-quarter view, her hair in the most dynamically described state of movement in any portrait drawing. The hair is blown or tossed, strands moving in multiple directions simultaneously, the mass undulating from the crown outward in waves that suggest wind or recent movement. Sidney spent sustained time on this hair — the individual strands, the waves, the places where the hair divides and the light comes through.
The face below receives comparatively less attention: the brow and eye are described, the nose and mouth barely suggested. The hair is the subject; the face is the occasion for the hair.
This compositional emphasis — the face as the base for the real subject, which is the hair — appears in several portraits throughout the collection. Sidney was consistently interested in hair as a formal subject in its own right: the way it moves, the way it behaves, the way its description challenges the pencil. Here that interest is at its most explicit.
The ear at right — the most carefully described facial element — is given the characteristic Cothran attention. The shoulder below is barely suggested in a few light marks.
The drawing has the quality of a rapid sustained engagement — Sidney looking at this person's hair with concentrated attention until he had it.