The art historian Catherine Lampert has suggested that the sitter for Head of a Woman was Lorna Wishart (1911–2000), with whom Freud had a protracted affair between 1942 and 1945. The ‘swollen lips’ were a distinguishing trait of hers, and the features are comparable to those in a drawing of 1944, Small Head I, in which an inscription identified the model as Lorna. In Head of a Woman, the head is downcast and the woman’s eyes are closed. The figure is illuminated by consistent lighting from the left, which produces shadows behind her fringe, below her lower lip and on the right-hand side of her face. The features are treated in naïve, boldly schematic outlines: the sitter’s hair hangs down on the right and forms a zigzag pattern; the face is described by firm, continuous lines of the pencil. Notwithstanding the simplicity and directness of the line drawing, the areas of shadow were created with contrastingly delicate areas of shading. The eyelids, nose and lips are fulsome, and the subject is treated with the schematic, non-naturalistic intensity that characterises some of Freud’s early work of the mid-forties. At that time, Freud used a variety of graphic styles concurrently. Head of a Woman can be placed somewhere between his invented picaresque mode and refined, elaborately modelled life studies. A picture label of Freud’s one-time dealer Anthony d’Offay dates the work to circa 1943, and this date may have been suggested by the artist himself.