Portrait, head and shoulders, turned to right and looking to front; the sitter is wearing a cravat and armour. Features in brown and sanguine, diagonally hatched with grey-blue, and with white in the eyes, on a very pale carnation ground; hair in brown wash, hatched with darker colour and with the lights in pale gouache, also over the carnation; cravat in pale brown wash, modelled and with the lights in thick white and the shadows in grey; armour in brown wash, hatched with grey and black, the lights in white and yellow for the studs; background in ochre, washed over with earth-colour hatched heavily with dark brown; on vellum put down on pasteboard.

Frame: Probably seventeenth-century turned oval, ivory painted black; a complex series of mouldings, rising from a short straight outer side, inward and upward at the front to a glazed rebate, gilded on the inner edge against the convex glass; backboard of pearwood, marked with concentric ovals, set in a copper ring. The frame has been coarsely repainted and the gilding is apparently no older than the nineteenth century Inscribed in ink, on the backboard: <i>SrW Portman [ ... J Daughter to Sr John / Cutler;</i> the inscription partly erased.