This early work by Paul Cadmus depicts his longtime friend and fellow artist Jared French reclining bare-chested on white sheets, holding a copy of James Joyce's *Ulysses*—a novel still banned in the United States at the time, lending the portrait a quiet note of intellectual defiance. Painted in Cadmus's characteristic Magic Realist style with meticulous, almost sculptural attention to flesh tones and anatomical detail, the intimate overhead vantage point and the subject's direct, knowing gaze create an unmistakable charge of homoerotic tenderness. As a portrait from the very beginning of Cadmus's career, before his controversial notoriety with *The Fleet's In!*, this work is a significant document of both the artist's personal circle and his early mastery of figurative painting. It holds particular value for collectors interested in queer American art history and the intersection of modernist literature and visual culture in Depression-era New York.