A combination of techniques that is becoming increasingly popular is the construction of part-based object represen- tations using the outputs of interest-point detectors. Our contributions in this paper are twofold: first, we propose a primal-sketch-based set of image tokens that are used for object representation and detection. Second, top-down information is introduced based on an efficient method for the evaluation of the likelihood of hypothesized part locations. This allows us to use graphical model techniques to complement bottom-up detection, by proposing and finding the parts of the object that were missed by the front-end feature detection stage. Detection results for four object categories validate the merits of this joint top-down and bottom-up approach.