The subject of this painting is Carlos Negrón, the brother of Alice Neel's lover, José Santiago. He was twenty-four years old at the time and had come to live in New York's Spanish Harlem from his native Puerto Rico two years earlier. Tuberculosis runs rampant in poor, overcrowded urban neighborhoods, and in 1940 the available treatments were few and drastic. The bandage on Negrón's chest covers the wound where surgeons removed eleven ribs in an attempt to drain fluid.

Like the German expressionist painters whom she admired, Neel has deliberately distorted the figure, elongating Negrón's neck and arms and using heavy, dark outlines to emphasize and flatten the forms. The sick man's face expresses both suffering and a kind of sensuality, while his pose and the gesture of his right hand call to mind traditional images of the martyred Christ.

Although it is certainly empathetic, Neel's painting is not sentimental. Like so many of her portraits of neighbors from this period, it makes a political point about the underclass without sacrificing the subject's individuality.