A group of four albumen carte-de-visite photographs depicting Léopold Verrecke, billed on the mounts as the great gymnast from Paris, produced in 1863 by Charles DeForest Fredricks at his celebrated studio at 587 Broadway, New York. Verrecke was a Belgian trapeze artist who rose to prominence at the Cirque Napoléon in Paris and later piloted a mail balloon out of the besieged city during the Franco-Prussian War.

Each card presents Verrecke in a different pose on ropes and trapeze apparatus: seated casually on a rope swing with one hand gripping a rope and legs crossed; suspended mid-air gripping a rope overhead with one arm fully extended and the other clutching a wooden bar; hanging with arms folded across the chest while straddling a horizontal bar; and reaching upward with both arms, juggling clubs aloft. Throughout all four views he wears a close-fitting athletic costume with a fringed yoke and cross medallion at the chest, a wide leather belt, form-fitting tights, and soft gymnastic slippers. The variety of poses, each showing a distinct apparatus configuration and muscular control, gives the set the character of a deliberate promotional series.

Verrecke was among the leading performers engaged by director Louis Dejean for the Cirque Napoléon, the ring where Jules Léotard introduced the flying trapeze in 1859. Seven years after these portraits were made, during the Siege of Paris, he took command of the gas balloon Général Chanzy, which rose from the Gare du Nord in the early hours of 20 December 1870 with three passengers, carrier pigeons, and 25 kilograms of mail, including a letter from Georges Clemenceau to his wife. After seven and a half hours and roughly 760 kilometers the balloon came down in Bavaria, where Verrecke was captured, mistreated, and repeatedly threatened with execution. He afterward turned his experience to designing improved balloon anchors.

Charles DeForest Fredricks (1823–1894) was an innovative American photographer whose Broadway studio was noted in the 1860s for its cartes de visite, and he did significant trade with the theatrical and performing professions. In this period gymnasts helped transform the circus into a space that valued a virile beauty, seen in photographs of acrobats displaying honed physiques and carefully trimmed moustaches, and the Verrecke series exemplifies that visual ideal. A copyright-registered promotional series like this one reflects the commercial appetite for gymnast celebrity cards at that moment.

The lower margin of three cards reads: "VERRECKE, the great Gymnast from Paris. Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1863, by Chas. D. Fredricks & Co., in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York." The reverse of one card bears the green-printed studio imprint: C.D. Fredricks & Co., 587 Broadway, New York; 108 Calle de la Habana, Habana; 31 Passage du Havre, Paris. The remaining three reverses are blank.