A large ink portrait with the most energetically curly hair in the collection — a young person seen in three-quarter profile, the face turned slightly to the right, the eyes cast slightly downward, framed by an extraordinary mass of tight, individually described curls. The curls are drawn with Sidney's most patient and most playful mark — each one a small loop or spiral, repeated across the entire head in varying sizes, the mass building from dozens of individual coiling marks.
This curly hair connects directly to the green chalk portrait (889) where Sidney rendered curly hair in a different medium — and to the spiral vocabulary throughout the collection. Curls are small spirals; a head of curls is Sidney's central form proliferating across a human head. He always looked at curly hair with particular attention.
The face below the curls is described with ink's characteristic confidence: the eye and brow in a few specific marks, the nose in profile, the lips barely suggested. The ear at left — visible through and beneath the curls — is given the characteristic Cothran attention to cartilage.
A striped shirt at the lower portion — the second striped shirt in the portrait series — adds clothing specificity without competing with the face. At upper right, a few vertical marks suggesting a wall or curtain establish the studio context.
The expression — slightly downward, absorbed, neither engaged nor disengaged — is the most neutral in the ink portraits.