Oil on canvas, 13 × 16 inches (22 × 25 inches including the artist’s hand-finished frame)

The composition focuses on the head and upper shoulders of a young woman turned slightly away from the viewer. The gesture is modest, withholding expression, and yet filled with suggestion. The light falls from above, catching the pale tones of the hair and fabric, while the surrounding green field provides a quiet counterweight to the delicacy of the form.

The structure of the image depends on restraint: movement is implied rather than shown. The rhythm of the brushwork across the hair introduces a sense of air and motion, balanced by the calm of the surrounding space. Every element serves the painting’s central question — how emotion might exist within composure.

The title Wistful Thinking evokes the suspended state between memory and anticipation. A line from Christina Rossetti’s Echo offers a fitting undercurrent:

“Come to me in the silence of the night;
Come in the speaking silence of a dream.”

The painting inhabits that threshold between the remembered and the imagined. It is neither portrait nor reverie, but an exploration of how longing may be formalised through the simplest relations of light, colour, and turning.

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