A bust-length ink portrait of a man wearing a hat — a flat-brimmed or slight-brimmed cap, drawn with three or four decisive horizontal ink strokes for the brim and a block of hatching for the crown. The hat is the first headwear in the ink sketchbook series and immediately transforms the portrait's character: the brim's shadow falls across the upper face, and the whole figure acquires a working-life specificity — a man with somewhere to be.
The face beneath the hat is compact and set, the brow low, the eyes slightly narrow, the expression neither welcoming nor hostile but simply weathered. The shadow at the cheek and below the nose is built with dense hatching. The neck below the face carries hatching at the shadow zones; the shirt at the shoulder is indicated with brief marks.
The hat organizes the composition's upper zone in a way no other portrait in the sketchbook achieves — the flat geometry of the brim as a strong horizontal cutting across the top of the face, the crown's block above it. Against this geometry, the face's organic contours read differently: more vulnerable, more specific, more enclosed.
In a collection that has drawn hundreds of bare-headed subjects, the hat is a compositional event. It places the subject in a social and occupational context that the bare-headed portraits leave open. This man wears his hat inside, which means either he is on his way somewhere or he simply always wears it.