A seated figure in red chalk, the arms raised overhead and behind the head — the elbows bent, the hands lost in the hair or meeting above the crown. The pose opens the torso fully: the underarms exposed, the ribcage extended, the whole front of the body offered to the air. It is a pose of openness and physical ease, the body at its most expanded.
The red chalk line follows the figure's outer contours with a single unbroken movement, the arms rising from the shoulders to the upper edge of the composition, the torso below tapering to the waist and then the seated hip and leg. The right breast is described with the characteristic small circle at the nipple; the left side is less resolved, the arm crossing it.
The face is minimal — in profile or near-profile, looking left, the features briefly placed. The head is not the subject here. The raised arms and the opened torso are the subject, the body in its most architecturally expanded state. The figure seems not posed but caught in a natural moment of stretching or gathering the hair.
Within the collection's catalog of body positions — the closed fetal, the back-turned, the direct frontal — the arms-overhead figure is among the most open and the most architecturally interesting. The figure becomes briefly a series of triangles: the arms forming a triangle above, the torso an inverted triangle below.