A large charcoal portrait of a young person with elaborately drawn curly hair — one of the finest charcoal portraits in the collection. The hair is the most sustained element: multiple individual curls described with charcoal's blending capacity, each curl given its roundness through the soft tonal buildup that the medium allows. The overall mass builds from these individual observations into a convincingly volumetric form that crowns the face below.
The face looks forward with an expression of mild, slightly surprised engagement — the eyes wide and directly outward, the lips barely parted. The expression has a quality of someone who has been caught in the act of being themselves: unselfconscious, present, momentarily exposed.
The charcoal is handled with the confident blending that distinguishes the best charcoal works from the more tentative ones — the shadow at the eye sockets, under the nose, and at the jaw built from multiple soft passes, the form emerging gradually rather than being drawn in at once.
A jacket with a lapel below — indicated in light charcoal marks — grounds the figure in a specific social context. The warm cream paper holds the charcoal marks with a softness that the white papers don't achieve.