Portrait of a man, head and shoulders, to front, wearing a sash across left shoulder and a lace neckcloth. Features worked in delicate blended brown and sanguine, with blue and black for the eyes; hair in brown wash, lined with darker colour and with the lights in pale gouache; all on a warm carnation ground; cravat in white over pale brown wash, coat in red, shadowed in darker colour and with the lights in white; robe in blue wash, shadowed in darker colour and with the lights in grey; background a pale brown wash, hatched and worked in darker brown and grey; on vellum put down on a leaf from a table-book.

Frame: Nineteenth- or early twentieth-century silver locket, the convex back soldered to sides with a deep outer channel, stepping inward with a narrow channel to the bezel, which holds the shallowly convex glass by its rounded and polished edges; the hanger of square section wire with a central groove, bifurcating at the back into twin diminishing spirals of seven-and-a-halfturns.