This drawing depicts W. G. Head, known as Bill, a builder and decorator who lived in Burghclere, Wiltshire. He was hired by Stanley Spencer’s patrons Mary and John Louis Behrend to build the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Burghclere, which was decorated with Spencer’s wall paintings and murals. His work on the chapel is extensively documented in the archives of the National Trust. The drawing was apparently made in a single session and Spencer dated it 19 January 1932. Spencer, his wife Hilda and their baby daughter Shirin lived at Burghclere throughout much of the work on the chapel: they moved to Palmer’s Hill Farm in May 1927, and the Behrends had Bill Head construct a cottage for them, Chapel View, closer to the building site, which they moved to the following year. Only when much of the painting had been finished did they leave Burghclere to live in Spencer’s home village of Cookham. They removed in late January 1932, and the date of Spencer’s drawing of W. G. Head means it was made on the eve of Spencer’s departure. Head was one of those who attended a service of thanksgiving in 1932, which marked the completion of the chapel, and also the dinner afterwards, which was presided over by Spencer and the Rector of Burghclere Reverend Canon R. S. Medlicott. He was an important but hitherto underappreciated figure in the execution of the Sandham Memorial Chapel, and this drawing reflects the esteem with which Spencer regarded him.

Spencer was adept at intimate pencil portraits such as this. He invariably filled the sheet of paper and took considerable interest in the character or personality of his sitters. In a letter to his friend and patron Mary Behrend, written a few months before he made this drawing of W. G. Head, Spencer described some similar works he had undertaken in Cookham:

"I have done several drawings of heads. The farmer’s Wife (Mrs Hatch), her daughter, the ex-organist of Cookham Church, the bootmaker, and the Chemist […]. All these folk are very obliging. Mr Francis, the baker, quite readily consented to sit in his best (white) and white with flour as he is in the bakehouse. […] There is some very good quality in the Cookham species of vulgarity; it gives them a vitality that is rare these days."

This letter suggests that Spencer’s drawings of heads were not commissions but rather a by-product of his keen interest in certain subjects. He chose individuals not for their sophisticated or extraordinary natures, but because they were vivid and ordinary. He especially chose working people since he considered them to be the most characterful sort of people. Their professions also made them distinctive in his mind; there was something timeless about them since they might have practiced the same kind of work—baker, builder, organist, etc.—at any point over the preceding centuries.