A back-oblique standing figure in black chalk, the right arm raised and bent at the elbow — the hand reaching back toward the neck or hair, the elbow angling upward and to the right — creating the most active upper-body gesture in the back-view figures of the new portfolio. The hair is pulled into a topknot bun at the crown, with loose strands falling from the bun to the shoulders. The figure's back fills the full height of the narrow paper from the topknot at the top to the feet at the bottom, the raised elbow extending the silhouette's upper right edge outward beyond the shoulder line.
The black chalk lines are bold and confident, the outer contour of the left side from shoulder to foot drawn as a single uninterrupted stroke. The spine's descent is marked by a brief central line from neck to lower back. The raised arm receives particular mark-making attention: the elbow above described in multiple lines, the upper arm's angle, the gesture visible at the right edge as the arm extends away from the body. The topknot bun at the crown is drawn in the same circular mark-making as previous bun hairstyles in the collection — small overlapping curves building the bundled mass.
The raised arm reaching back toward the neck or hair suggests a specific caught-in-action moment: the model adjusting her hair, or scratching her neck, or in some other ordinary gesture of self-tending. This gives the drawing a candid quality absent from the posed stillness of most back-views — the figure doing something rather than simply standing. The gesture connects to Work 1422's place in the bun-hair series that runs through the figure drawings (Works 474, 481, 514, 523, 605), where the bun functions as both compositional element and human detail.
Among the back-view figures in the 9.5"×25" format — 1413, 1421, 1425 — this is the most dynamic, the raised elbow interrupting the body's vertical symmetry and introducing an asymmetry that gives the drawing energy. The topknot bun, shared with the earlier back-view figure of Work 1411's related portrait sequence, appears here for the first time in the narrow-format drawings as a topknot specifically rather than a lower bun, adding a different kind of vertical extension to the upper composition.