Elaine de Kooning's Portrait of William T. Brown (c. 1953) belongs to the "faceless men" series she painted between roughly 1947 and 1956 — her own answer to Abstract Expressionism. While her peers abandoned the figure, she brought the speed and attack of action painting to portraiture, depicting friends and family in informal poses with blank or blurred faces. Posture mattered more to her than likeness.

The sitter leans back with his legs crossed, a stance she would return to a decade later in her portraits of John F. Kennedy. Working in ochre, olive, umber, and slate blue, de Kooning builds the figure from the same quick, loaded strokes as the room around him, so that his pale shirt and the wall behind it share one continuous surface. The head is a single brown mark — unreadable, and entirely convincing.

William Theophilus Brown became a leading Bay Area Figurative painter; de Kooning mentored him in postwar New York, and her sports and basketball canvases shaped his "Football" series. The painting was owned by Edward M. Nagel, the collector and philanthropist who served as a commissioner of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, and was exhibited at Gump's Gallery in 1959. Its closest museum counterpart is Willem de Kooning (c. 1952) at the National Portrait Gallery, which holds thirteen of her portraits — the largest group in any institution.