In the late 1890s Russell became quite interested in making head studies of male and female Indian subjects. Some of them were done in profile, while others such as the portrait study of a woman seen here were done full face. A number of the studies, like this one, are in transparent washes of watercolor. The tribal affiliation of the woman in this study is not known, but she wears her hair in typical plains Indian fashion. Clark Wissler, a noted authority on the Blackfeet, observed in a report published in 1910 that most plains Indian women wore their hair in braids, or loose so it would cover their ears. In both cases, the hair was always parted carefully in the middle. The young woman depicted here wears little in the way of ornament, except for hoop earrings that seem to be fashioned from brass wire that was acquired in trade. She tucks her long dark hair into the folds of a trade blanket that she has tightly pulled over her shoulders, like a blanket coat. In this watercolor, Russell has worked to effectively render the woman’s facial features, and for the most part he was successful. The soft washes of color that define the blanket are particularly effective, for Russell took advantage of the rough texture of the watercolor paper to animate the blanket’s stripes and folds.