A sanguine figure study on the small 9 by 7 horizontal sheet — a reclining or lying figure with one leg raised straight upward, the foot and lower leg extending to the top of the composition, the rest of the body receding below into a compressed mass. The raised leg is the composition's vertical axis: it rises from the body's mass at the center and terminates at the paper's upper edge, the foot cut off. Below the raised leg the body's other elements — the other leg, the torso, a hand, fabric — are compressed into a lower-compositional zone. A draping element at the lower right adds texture.
The single raised leg as the composition's primary vertical element echoes the dramatic inversions and spatial experiments that run through the portfolio's most ambitious figure works: Work 1514's foreshortened feet, Work 1555's own contribution to the extreme-pose series. The raised leg pointing to the ceiling — the foot at the paper's top, the body at the bottom — gives the composition a quality of suspended motion: the leg held up, the figure arrested in an extreme position.
The small 9 by 7 format makes the raised-leg composition particularly concentrated — the entire spatial journey from the body at the bottom to the foot at the top accomplished within a small physical space. The sanguine chalk's warmth gives the raised leg and the compressed body below a unified organic quality, the red chalk on white making the figure glow against its ground.