A seated woman in red chalk, the body in three-quarter view, one knee drawn up and both arms forward — the right arm resting along the knee, the hand falling naturally. The face is direct and level: the eyes meeting the viewer steadily, not performing, not withdrawing. The gaze is calm and frank, the kind that comes from a model experienced in the studio or a person simply secure in their own presence.
The hair is swept up into a large, loose updo — not the tight coiled bun of the spiral vocabulary, but a voluminous atmospheric mass that rises and crowns the figure. The upswept hair is drawn with many following marks that give it both its height and its looseness, a mass that has been pinned but not constrained. It frames the face with warmth rather than architecture.
The hands are among the most elegantly drawn in the red chalk sequence. The right hand at the knee — fingers loosely spread, the wrist completing the arm's curve — is rendered with confident individual finger marks. The composition from the hand at the bottom through the arm to the shoulder to the face and the hair crown traces a single resolved diagonal.
The red chalk throughout is applied with full confidence: the shadow under the breast, the modeling at the hip, the shadow at the side of the nose. This is a session drawing that reached genuine completion — a rare quality in a life class context where most drawings stop short of full resolution. The updo, the frank gaze, the resolved hands: three strong notes in one drawing.