A back-view standing figure in blue chalk — the arms crossed over each other at shoulder height, each hand reaching to the opposite shoulder in a full self-embrace seen from behind. The head bows forward and down, the chin toward the chest, the hair at the crown briefly indicated. Below, the body descends in the characteristic narrow-format contour: the back's width at the crossed-arms level narrowing below, the hips, the legs to the feet. The feet are given the characteristic individual-toe treatment, both feet side by side at the paper's lower edge.
The self-embrace from behind is compositionally unusual: the arms crossing at shoulder level create an X-shaped form that replaces the usual shoulder-and-upper-arm silhouette with something more complex, the two forearms angling diagonally toward the opposite sides. Each hand grips or rests on the opposite shoulder — the right hand at the left shoulder, the left hand at the right — completing the cross-pattern. This is the most enclosed and self-containing gesture in the new portfolio's back-view sub-series, the body literally holding itself from behind.
The blue chalk on white paper maintains the medium's characteristic cool precision, the marks spare and single-pass. The self-embrace's crossed arms receive more marks than the rest of the figure, the two forearm lines and the hands at the shoulders each described with brief specific marks. The bowed head — the same downward bow as in Work 1464 [The Blue Bow] — reappears in this second blue chalk figure, suggesting that the downward-bowing head may be a specific quality of the model drawn in these blue chalk sessions or a compositional preference when working in this medium.
The self-embrace seen from behind connects to the portfolio's extensive self-enclosing gesture series (1405, 1428, 1430, 1468) while offering the most complete version: the arms reaching all the way to the opposite shoulders, the body entirely wrapped by its own arms. From behind, without the face, the embrace becomes purely formal and structural — an X superimposed on a back — and the emotional content of self-holding is communicated entirely through posture rather than expression.