Dato' Hoessein Enas relished doing portraits in pastels as it was fast and spontaneous and it helped honed his skills in eye-hand coordination not only in getting the aura and character but also that of beauty, as his subjects were invariably nubile young maidens from various ethnic communities – Malay, Sarawakian, Javanese, Korean, Burmese. Sometimes, his grown-up daughters, all of them pretty, were used as his models, painted with greater adoration and love. While the oil commissions fetched higher prices, the pastel portraits were not diminished in quality. In this work, Melor, the young beauty is clothed in a white transparent blouse signifying purity and showing glimpses of her tender skin, and her head is wrapped in red cloth maybe to diminish any sense of sensuality. She is imbued with ravishing youth and innocence. Some of Hoessein’s best portraitures can be gleaned in the 56 commissioned Shell paintings done in 1956, under the banner, The Malaysians. The Angkatan Pelukis SeMalaysia he founded in 1956, after a similar association in Medan in Indonesia in 1944, espoused The Cult of the Figure. Hoessein, who hailed from Indonesia with the solid figurative tradition of Basuki Abdullah and Dullah, was dubbed by the Malaysian media as the Man With The Golden Hands.   Dato' Hoessein Enas was accorded a Retrospective by the National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, in 1966 – 10 years after he obtained Malaysian citizenship, and a major posthumous exhibition was organised by the Ilham Gallery in Kuala Lumpur in December 2015. The Sultan of Selangor appointed him as a ‘royal painter’ (1990) and the next year, awarded him the Dato’ title. Hoessein’s first solo was in London, at the Charneil Gallery in Chelsea, in London, in 1960, when he won a UNESCO fellowship and an Asia Foundation grant. Other awards followed: the United States fellowship (1969), and the Colombo Plan twice (1968 and 1976). His auction record was set at the 2011 Henry Butcher Art Auction for his Morning Mist No. 4 (1991-1992) which sold for a RM198,000 premium.