Girl's Head by Scottish artist James Cowie (1886-1956) is a pencil sketch that captures a young woman, likely one of his students during his time at Bellshill Academy, with short hair, a round face, and attention to detail around the eyes, nose, and mouth. The woman is looking to the side, away from the viewer. Cowie uses a smudging technique paired with sharper lines to create the contoured shape of the woman's face and features. Looser and less controlled strokes of pencil reflect the slight curling of the woman's hair at the ends, showing she wore the popular cropped hairstyle for the time period. The attention to detail and precise line work represents the unique skillset that Cowie brought at a time when paintings were more popular amongst his contemporaries. 

In his earlier years as an artist, Cowie taught at Bellshill Academy near Glasgow and was well known for an art style related to precision and objectivity around a subject, present in this work with the fine details. Cowie would often draw or paint his students and family members, usually to study in preparation for another, larger piece of work. His sketches were attributed to the style of linear realism, reflecting that idea of precisely capturing a subject with intentional linework. 

James Cowie RSA, 1886-1956

Cowie was born on a farm near Cuminestown, Aberdeenshire. In 1906, while studying English literature at Aberdeen University, he became increasingly attracted to the visual arts, eventually studying at Glasgow School of Art from 1912 to 1914. During the 1920s he showed paintings regularly at the annual exhibitions in Glasgow and Edinburgh, but it was not until 1935 that he held his first one-man show, at the McLellan Galleries in Glasgow. That same year he was appointed Head of Painting at Gray's School of Art in Aberdeen before going, in 1937, to work at Hospitalfield in Arbroath. He retired from a lifetime's teaching in 1948. An exquisite line-drawing technique, coupled with a meticulous approach to detail and composition, marked Cowie out from the majority of his Scottish contemporaries, with their preference for more painterly qualities, but he was also a painter of considerable individuality.