A large ink portrait seen nearly from behind — the most radical back-view in the portrait series. The composition shows the back of a man's head with a brimmed hat, the figure turned so far away that only a sliver of the profile is visible at the right edge of the composition. This is a portrait from which the face has almost entirely retreated.
The hat occupies the upper two-thirds of the composition: a wide-brimmed hat, its form described in a few confident marks — the crown, the brim's front edge, the band's position. The hat reads as a military or cowboy-style brimmed hat, the shape specific enough to suggest a particular type.
At the right edge, barely visible: the nose in profile, the mouth, and the slight compression of the cheek against the collar. These three glimpsed features are the only facial content in the entire composition — everything else is hat and jacket from behind.
The jacket below — suggested in loose marks — grounds the figure in clothing without elaborating it. The back of the neck between hat and collar is the most intimate zone: the short-cropped hair above the collar, the neck's vertical and horizontal muscles barely indicated.
This back-view portrait pushes the portrait genre to its limit: how little face is still a portrait? Sidney answered: this much.