A left-facing profile portrait reduced to its most essential elements — the face described with a minimum of marks, the hair described with almost none, just the outer silhouette: a single large arc from the crown forward past the brow to the shoulder level, enclosing the face as a field of emptiness. The hair's volume is given entirely by its contour, the interior left as bare paper.
The face within this arc is briefly but correctly placed: the brow with its slight line, the eye with its lash, the nose in its characteristic profile downward-curve, the lips barely parted. The chin and jaw complete the profile, the neck transitioning into a garment that is sketched in the lower left. At the far right, a few strokes indicate the hair's falling behind the ear.
The drawing's compositional logic is unusual in the sequence — the hair silhouette as architecture, the face as what it frames. Most of these portraits give the hair texture and interior marks; here the hair is pure shape, a single line defining a volume that the paper holds. The result is one of the cleanest and most formally considered profiles in the sketchbook run.
The large arc of the hair silhouette against the bare paper has a quality approaching the East Asian brush painting tradition — the single line that holds a form, the emptiness as content. This connection is unlikely to be intentional, but it places the drawing in good company.