Portrait of a man, head and shoulders, to right and looking to front. Features broadly brushed, the strokes tending horizontally, in brown and sanguine, with gum and opaque grey touches, blended with gouache over a pale creamy carnation ground; the hair washed in brown over a paler brown wash, and the lights in gouache; costume washed and worked over in layers of brown and grey gouache; the background in pale brown washes, hatched over with dark brown to the left of the sitter's head; a marginal gold strip; on vellum put down on pasteboard (cut from a playing card).

Frame: Seventeenth-century gold locket, the back of flat glass held in a rebate; the sides straight with a central fillet of square section down the middle, the upper part of the sides flaring out slightly to the bezel, which holds a slightly convex glass by its bevelled edge; no visible marks of a hanger or other devices for suspension. The glazed compartment at the back contains a lock of hair; engraved on the outer flange of the rebate: Iohn Dormer 1674 In Heaven is my Hope and Rest.