The most ethereally light portrait in the entire collection — a pencil portrait of a woman whose face is bowed forward and down, the eyes closed or looking down at something below the frame, the lips gently parted. Around the face a large volume of hair flows: waves described with the lightest possible pencil marks, the curls at the sides and below barely touching the paper's surface. The pencil marks are so light that much of the paper reads as pure white even where marks are present, the entire portrait hovering at the edge of visibility.
The lightness is extreme even within the collection's range of pencil works. Work 1435 (the ghost blue chalk) was described as nearly dissolving, but this pencil portrait goes further: where 1435's blue chalk lines were at least consistently visible, here sections of the portrait are genuinely uncertain — the curl at the lower left, the shoulder marks at the lower right — barely registering as marks at all. The face at center is the most present zone, the eyes and nose described with slightly more pressure, but even these read as whispers rather than statements.
The bowed face with the eyes downcast or closed, surrounded by the barely-present hair, gives this portrait the quality of someone observed in a moment of private absorption who was barely there — or perhaps barely observed. The extreme lightness may reflect a pencil held at maximum distance, or a deliberate choice to record the face with minimum intrusion. Among all the portraits in the collection, this one is the most respectful of its subject's privacy, the lightest possible presence on the paper.