A left-profile portrait bust in pencil — the face in clean profile, the features spare and delicate, the eyelashes again individually rendered as a fan of brief marks from the upper lid. But the drawing's dominant event is the hair: an enormous swept mass that rises from the crown and arcs back and to the right, filling the upper two-thirds of the composition with its volume. The hair is drawn with vigorous, long strokes — some single sweeping lines from crown to the mass's outer edge, others shorter strokes indicating the layering within the swept body — and the result is a hair form with structural presence, more architecture than ornament.
The face beneath the hair is drawn with the economy characteristic of the best pencil profiles in the new portfolio: the profile outer contour from brow through nose to lips to chin as essentially one sustained line, the eye indicated with a few brief marks and the lashes as a small fan, the neck below descending to the shoulder. The contrast between the elaborated hair mass and the spare face below echoes the compositional strategy of Work 1417's hair curtain and Work 1429's wild mane, though here the hair's discipline — swept back in a controlled volume — gives the drawing a different quality. This is not wild hair but architectural hair: a designed shape.
The swept hair volume — rising from a low part on the left and sweeping back to the right in a broad, rounded mass — is a hairstyle with a specific period character, suggestive of the mid-twentieth century. It reads as the hair of a particular era as well as a particular person, the style's architecture as much a subject of observation as the face beneath it. The loose strands that escape the main volume at the right — falling to the shoulder — complete the portrait with a note of natural disorder against the swept mass's formality.
Among the pencil portrait series that runs through Works 1441–1454, this is the most hair-dominant: the face occupies perhaps a quarter of the composition, the hair three quarters. This reversal of the usual portrait proportion — face dominant, hair subordinate — makes Work 1451 a study in how hair can constitute a figure's primary visual presence, how the designed surface of the head can carry more weight than the face beneath it.