A left-profile ink portrait of a person wearing a geometric cap or hat — the hat's forms described with bold angular marks: a flat brim, a rectangular crown, the whole structure given hard edges that contrast with the soft organic forms of the face below. This is a different cap and a different face from Work 1492 [The Man in the Flat Cap]: where 1492 was drawn with rapid gestural strokes and depicted an older, heavier face, this portrait is slightly more deliberate in execution and depicts a younger or lighter-featured face below the cap's geometry. The ear at the left is described with specific structural attention; the profile below shows the nose, lips, and chin in clean left-facing view.
The bold ink on cream paper gives the portrait the same warm, rich quality as the other ink-on-cream works in the series (1492, 1493). The cap receives the most marks: the geometric edges drawn with heavy emphatic strokes that give the hat authority as the composition's dominant formal element. Below the hat's hard edges the face's organic lines — the profile curve from brow to chin — create a deliberate formal contrast: geometry above, organism below.
The clothed figure with the distinctive cap signals the same social-portrait mode as Works 1477, 1485, and 1492. Among these clothed portraits, Work 1497 stands between 1492's working-class gestural energy and 1494's elegant youth: a portrait of someone in their mid-life, wearing a specific hat that functions as both personal style and social marker. The cap series across Works 1492 and 1497 constitutes a small sub-theme within the portrait sequence: the hat as defining element, the face beneath it as the human content of the social container.