Portrait of a woman, head and shoulders and facing to front. Features in large soft strokes of brown and sanguine, with bright blue and blue-green stippled shading and broad coarse sanguine hatches crossing the features and neck diagonally, on a very pale carnation ground; hair in pale brown wash, hatched and lined in darker colour with the lights
in pale gouache with some blue touches; chemise in white wash modelled in grey; the costume freely washed with ultramarine and lake, with the lights in white; background in ochre gouache over blue (originally intended to be a sky?) with some opaque blue stipple superimposed; on vellum put down on a leaf from a table-book.

Frame: Twentieth-century oval frame of turned ebonised fruitwood; the sides rounded, rising through a complex series of mouldings before descending sharply to a narrow black fillet above an inner ring of gilded wood forming the upper surface of the rebate, which holds the shallowly convex glass; the hanger a simple brass ring held by a small staple driven into the frame.