A large-format pencil portrait — 25 by 33.75 inches — with the most sustained and most individual hair treatment in the entire collection. The young woman is in left profile, the face described with the characteristic attention to the eye, the nose, the lips. But the hair is the drawing's defining achievement: a bob cut described with individual parallel strands drawn separately from crown to the hair's lower edge, each strand its own mark, the whole mass built strand by strand into a unified volume. The sheer labor of this hair description — at this scale, on this paper, with this level of individual attention — is extraordinary.
The individual-strand hair technique is the most technically ambitious mark-making approach in the portrait series. Where most hair in the collection is described with three or four broad sweeping marks that suggest the hair's direction and volume, here each strand has its own existence. The parallel marks at the crown, the arcing strands at the sides, the blunt cut-line at the bottom: all described with the patience of a Flemish master working at a miniature scale but here applied to a large sheet.
The clothed torso below the hair and face is described with broader, less detailed marks — a draped collar and the beginning of sleeves — in appropriate proportion to the face and hair's detail. The whole portrait has a quality of deliberate, sustained effort: this is not the quick observation of the ink portrait series or the immediate recording of the figure drawing sessions, but a sustained studio study made over time with the patience appropriate to the large format and the meticulous hair treatment.