A pencil portrait head in three-quarter view with the most distinctive gesture in any portrait drawing in this sequence: the subject's own hand is drawn up to the throat, the fingers curled lightly around the neck, the thumb visible at the side. The face above the hand looks slightly to the left with an expression that is thoughtful, perhaps slightly wary — the hand at the throat a gesture of self-touch, self-comfort, or self-protection.
The hair falls in long straight lines from the crown, each strand individually suggested with the pencil — the volume of the hair built from accumulated parallel marks rather than from outline. The ear is briefly visible through the hair at the right, the Cothran ear-marking present even in this small format.
The hand is the composition's most described element, as specific as any hand in the portrait sequence. The individual fingers are traced, the knuckle lines indicated, the curve of the palm where it meets the neck. The hand at the throat creates an unusual compositional triangle: face, hair, and hand interacting in the lower third of the drawing.
This gesture — hand to throat — appears nowhere else in the collection. It gives the portrait a psychological specificity that goes beyond pose or expression: the body's self-touching as a form of interiority made visible. A modest drawing in scale, but one of the more emotionally specific in the portrait group.