This is the brother of the young girl in my last post. These are birthday portraits and the parents like them to be a little on the formal side. Your comments are of great interst to me.
The composition is very nice.
It absolutely is clipping. That is
not something you can judge by looking at a monitor. Instead you want to look at a histogram, at a minimum. But a great way to make judgments about levels is to use a "threshold" view. It displays everything above a threshold as white and everything below as black.
But then you also need to know what various levels actually mean too! You need to know, for example, that most monitors and maybe prints too will not be able to separate values from 250 to 255, and they will all look the same. Any detail in that range is lost. Between 245 and 250 it isn't as bad, but it still amounts to just "bright" and we are not able to see detail. So virtually any area of an image that you want to show detail in the highlights... you want at a value of about 245
maximum . For someone's face, you want the highlights to be less than a value of 240.
Now, if you view your image in an editor with a threshold display set to 255, meaning everything that is white is literally clipping, much of the left side of his face and most of the shirt and top half of his pants are all clipping. Not just too bright to show detail, but literally over exposed in a way that reducing saturation or brightness is not going to restore any detail by putting in into a range that can be seen (say 230 to 240). The detail is gone. (If you have the RAW file, or if the original JPEG was darker, it is probably something that can be correct. But not from the image you've posted.)
Personally I would also reduce the saturation significantly, and also the contrast just enough to allow a little bit of detail to show on the chair rather than having it totally blocking as black. Those fall into the area of personal preference though.
