A seated nude in charcoal — the most classically composed figure in the batch — placed in the upper-left quadrant of the horizontal 17 by 14 sheet, the body occupying less than half the paper's area and surrounded by extensive white space at the right and below. The figure is in left profile, the head bowed and the face looking downward, the knees drawn up toward the chest, the arms behind supporting the body. The charcoal marks are soft and tonal: shadow at the back of the bowed head, at the back below the shoulder, at the buttock and the leg's inner surface — the figure given volume through these shadow zones while the surrounding paper remains entirely clear.
The generous white space around the figure is the composition's primary formal decision. Where most works in the new portfolio fill the paper edge to edge, here the figure is placed deliberately in one corner, the rest of the paper a field of emptiness that the figure does not claim. This negative space gives the composition an unusual quality of solitude: the figure is small in its space, contained and private, the vast paper around it functioning as the world the figure has withdrawn from.
The bowed head and the drawn-up knees are the figure's two gestures of inwardness — the body gathered, the face hidden, the posture self-contained. The charcoal's soft quality suits this inwardness: where ink's sharpness would give the figure presence and assertion, charcoal's softness makes the figure seem to recede into the paper's warmth. This is the most emotionally restrained and the most formally sophisticated seated figure in the new portfolio — not through complexity of pose or treatment but through the deliberate decision to leave space, to let the figure be small within its world.
Among all the seated figures in the collection — the cross-legged sanguine of 1438, the floor-seated green chalk studies, the charcoal pregnancy figure, the ink stool study — this one achieves the most contemplative quality, the composition and the medium working together to produce a feeling of stillness that the more energetically drawn works do not have.