A large-format ink portrait of a man — the first clothed male portrait in the new portfolio sequence, and the first portrait in the collection in which the subject reads unmistakably as a Black man. He wears a shirt with a breast pocket, visible at the lower left of the composition. The face is in three-quarter view, the eyes wide and alert, the brows heavy above, the nose broad, the mouth slightly open as if in mid-speech or expression. The head is closely cropped, with a slight hair fringe at the very top. The ink is applied with the broad-nib or brush approach established in Work 1472, the line's variable width giving the portrait bold visual presence.
The ink on the warm ochre ground reads with the same rich quality as Work 1472's large portrait — the warm field making the black ink luminous rather than stark. The eyes here are the most specifically drawn in any ink portrait: the brows are emphatic dark marks, the eyes below described with the iris circles and the suggestion of the whites, the overall impression of a face with animated intelligence and direct attention. The mouth slightly open is a rare portrait feature in the collection — the face caught in the act of speaking or responding rather than in static quiet.
The clothed portrait — the shirt's collar and breast pocket described below the face — represents a different relationship between artist and subject from the nude figure studies that dominate the portfolios. This is a person in their social context, wearing what they wore that day, the clothing as much a part of the portrait as the face. The breast pocket's neat rectangular form at the lower left anchors the portrait in the everyday world with a domestic specificity that the nude figures deliberately exclude.
This portrait stands as one of the most significant in the collection: the large format, the expressive ink on ochre, the animated expression, the social particularity of the clothed figure — all make it a portrait of an individual rather than a figure study of a type. Among all the portraits in the new portfolio, this one most fully achieves the sense of a specific person encountered and observed.