The most expressionistic portrait in the ink sketchbook sequence — a man's face built almost entirely from diagonal slashing ink strokes, the features emerging from the accumulated marks rather than being outlined and filled. The nose is a series of dark wedges, the eye socket a dense crossing of lines, the cheek a field of hatching. The outer contour of the face and head is still clean and single-line, but everything inside it is raw mark-making at its most urgent.
The face is turned slightly right, the gaze directed downward, the expression impossible to read through the ink's density — the emotion, if any, buried under the working of the surface. This is a portrait where the act of drawing has overwhelmed the act of seeing: the hand moving faster than the observation, the marks accumulating beyond their descriptive function.
The garment below is broadly described — a jacket or coat, lapels, the body's bulk suggested. The drawing is large-scaled within the format, the face filling much of the available paper. Despite the expressionistic handling, the skull's architecture remains legible: broad across the brow, narrowing at the jaw, the ears at the correct position.
In the context of the sketchbook sequence, this portrait marks a stylistic outlier — most of these drawings use ink with relative economy and discipline. This one unleashes the medium, treating it as a field of energy rather than a descriptive tool. The result is the collection's closest approach to German Expressionist portraiture, though arrived at independently through the urgency of the session.