Portrait of a woman, head and shoulders, facing to front, her hair flowing over her left shoulder and wearing a pearl earring in the right ear. Features hatched in brown and sanguine, with blue and red stippling in the shadows, and gum highlights in the eyes, nostrils and lips, on a pale carnation ground; hair in brown wash over the carnation, hatched with darker colour and with pale gouache highlights; dress in transparent blue washes and the lights in white; robe in brown wash, hatched with darker colour and with pale gouache lights; chemise in white, modelled in grey, showing graphite underdrawing round the neckline; background a brown wash, hatched with darker colour and shading to paler colour behind the head; on vellum put down on a leaffrom a table-book.

Frame: A turned oval of ebonised fruitwood, with convex glass and velvet-covered backboard; a nineteenth-century imitation of the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century pattern.