The work departs radically from the fussily decorative headwear favoured by Victorian sculptors. Instead the boy is wearing a burnished hemispherical cap which gives the head a completely abstracted form when viewed from the back. The tension between the abstraction of the cap and the naturalism of the head takes the work beyond that of a conventional portrait study.

Provenance

Purchased by either J Quinn, 1914; NY, Scott and Fowles, 1924 or EP Schinman; ...; private collection, New York.