Abdul Rahman was a taxi driver and self-described Black Muslim nationalist. He sat for Alice twice in 1964, on the second occasion wearing a kufi, a trench coat and with one glove on and one off. [http://arthistorynewsreport.blogspot.nl/2017/07/alice-neel-uptown.html] ‘I know all the theory of everything,’ Alice Neel once said, ‘but when I paint I don’t think of anything except the subject and me.’ Abdul Rahman was a cab driver she painted more than once. Als: ‘What’s so powerful about a lot of Alice’s pictures of men is she doesn’t shy away from the erotic element. She lets it be known as part of the work. What is energizing in this painting is the erotics of her looking. She looks at men the way men might look at women or other men. It is delectable to her.’ [https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2017/apr/29/the-people-of-harlem-as-painted-by-alice-neel-in-pictures]