A seated back view in pencil — the figure on a stool or seat, the body turned slightly left, the right arm raised with the elbow at shoulder level and the forearm extending upward, the hand resting at or near the head. The back is the composition's primary subject: the shoulder blades and spine described with careful tonal marks, the back's organic form given more interior description than the typical contour-only back views. A breast is visible at the figure's left side, indicating the front-oblique orientation of the upper body. The stool's structure is briefly indicated below.
The raised arm — the elbow raised, the forearm angled upward — introduces an asymmetry into the back view's usual bilateral symmetry, the right shoulder elevated and the right side of the back altered by the arm's raised position. The arm's gesture connects this figure to the raised-arm back views in the narrow-format series (Work 1458) but here in a seated rather than standing context, the gesture's quality changing from reach to adjustment or rest.
The pencil marks are slightly more sustained in their tonal development than the minimal contour of the most economic back views — brief hatching at the inner shoulder blade zone and along the spine give the back's surface a suggestion of three-dimensionality. The 7.5 by 10 format places this among the compact studies of the batch, the seated figure filling most of the sheet's vertical extent.