A frontal portrait of a young person — the face broad and open, the eyes large and slightly shadowed with crosshatching that gives them both depth and a hint of darkness, the expression neutral, watchful. The head is topped with a simple cap or close-cropped hair, the neck and collar of a V-neck garment rendered with a few precise marks. The quality of the face — the broad forehead, the round cheeks, the small chin — suggests adolescence, the face still settling into adult proportions.
The ink technique here is more controlled and more considered than the Laughing Man portrait (516). The main contour lines are drawn with deliberation; the shadow marks within the face — at the eye sockets, at the nose wing, at the chin — are added in a second pass, crosshatched to create tone without losing the clarity of the underlying structure. The result is a face that reads immediately as a specific person rather than a type.
The most striking element is the gaze. The eyes look directly forward with an expression that is neither warm nor cold, neither happy nor sad, simply present. There is a quality of endurance in this face — of someone who has learned to wait. Children in life drawing studios often have this quality: they are patient because they have no choice.
Signed "Sidney Cothran" at lower left — the full name, suggesting this was a considered and completed work. The cream-colored paper warms the ink considerably, giving the portrait a different tonal quality from the cooler white-paper portraits.