A pencil figure drawing of exceptional compositional elegance — the most formally refined of the back-view torso studies. The figure is seen from behind, slightly turned, the upper body from crown to lower torso visible. The head is bowed forward so only the crown and the hair's fall are visible — no face, no expression, the figure known entirely through its back and its hair.
The hair is the composition's central subject and its finest technical achievement: a large mass falling from the crown down across the left shoulder and continuing down the back, described in long flowing parallel arcs that follow the hair's natural direction from the crown downward. This is hair understood as flowing water — the individual strands parallel, the overall mass unified, the direction consistent and graceful. It is among the finest hair drawings in the collection.
Below the hair, the back — shoulder blades, spine, waist — is described with an economy appropriate to a form that is mostly plane and curve. The shadow at the left shoulder where the hair falls gives the back its spatial relationship to the hair.
The composition's quiet ambition is to show the back as beautiful through the relationship between the body's plane and the hair's movement across it — the hair activating the static back, the back providing the surface for the hair's cascade.