A large-scale pencil portrait of a different model from Works 1443–1444 — older, heavier-faced, the features more prominent and more deeply described. The face is in near-left-profile, the head tilted slightly downward so that the chin is angled toward the left shoulder, the eyes below the brow looking down and to the left of the viewer. A fringe or textured mass at the top of the head — the hair indicated with dense short upward strokes — gives the crown an unruly quality; the main body of the hair falls behind the left ear and is visible at the right edge of the composition. The ear itself is drawn with specific detail: the helix, the lobe, the earlobe with a small earring or stud mark.
The pencil work is the most tonal and the most layered of the pencil portraits in the batch. The brow receives dense shadow marks, the eye socket shadow extends from the brow downward, the nose casts a shadow along its bridge toward the upper lip, and the area below the lips above the chin has a shadow zone of its own. Multiple passes of parallel marks build the face's three-dimensional form with more sustained tonal development than any of the pen portraits and comparable to the pencil portrait of Work 1441. The neck below the chin also receives shadow marks that anchor the head on the body.
The face's expression — the heavy-lidded eyes looking downward, the mouth in a neutral or slightly downturned position, the head's slight forward tilt — communicates a quality of introspection or heaviness, a person with something on their mind. This is a face with age in it: the marks at the corner of the mouth, the slight jowl line at the jaw, the heavier nose — the pencil capturing the specific accumulated experience of a particular face rather than the youth-ideal of many of the earlier figure portraits. It is one of the most characterful faces in the collection.
The 11"×13.75" format — a landscape-leaning proportion for what is essentially a head-and-shoulders portrait — gives this face more space around it than Work 1441's close-filled head. The extra space at right and below reads as the silence around the face's weight, the paper acknowledging the face's gravity by giving it room. Among all the portraits in the new portfolio, this one carries the most character and the most of what might be called life-experience, the face drawn with specific knowledge of how time leaves marks.