A frontal bust portrait in ink — the face in near-frontal three-quarter, the head tilted slightly forward so the gaze is downward-left. The face is fuller and heavier-featured than most in the ink portrait series: the nose broad with slightly flared nostrils described in ink, the lips full and set, the jaw broad. The hair rises in a wave at the crown and falls at both sides of the face. The interior marks at the face's center — around the nose and mouth — are the most densely applied in the composition, building a zone of concentrated shadow that gives the face a three-dimensional presence unusual in the otherwise contour-dominant ink portraits.
The tonal density around the nose and upper lip — built through overlapping short marks rather than hatching — creates a shadow zone that describes the recessed surface between the nose and the mouth. This is the most sustained tonal work on a face in the frontal ink portrait series, the marks carefully accumulated rather than swiftly placed. The result is a face that reads as volumetric: the nose projects forward, the lip recedes, the eye sockets have depth.
The downward-cast gaze and the fuller features give this face a quality of gravity and weight — not heaviness in the negative sense but substance, the face of someone who carries their own experience. Among the frontal ink portraits on ochre (1472, 1504, 1509), this one occupies the middle register of age and character: older than Work 1509's youthful frontality, more particular than Work 1472's bold assertion, the tonal concentration making it the most sculpturally described.