This drawing was made by Guston in 1945–46 as one of a series of illustrations for O. Henry's short story The Gift of the Magi, commissioned and published by ARTnews in December 1946. The image depicts Della, the story's heroine, her extraordinarily long hair cascading around her in waves of pencil line that Guston controlled with extraordinary subtlety. The drawing predates Guston's full turn to abstraction and belongs to the final years of his figurative practice, in which his draftsmanship was at its most refined. At nearly twenty-five inches in height and densely worked across its entire surface, it is among the largest and most fully realized drawings of his career on paper from this period, standing as one of the finest examples of his work on paper in both scale and level of execution. The work was shown at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1949, where it was listed as Della (Beautiful Hair), and is catalogued in the Philip Guston Foundation catalogue raisonné as D450012.