Émile Zola is portrayed in a striking close bust cabinet card with the name Zola written in script on the front mount below the image, showing the French novelist in middle age in a three-quarter view facing slightly to his left. Zola wears wire-framed pince-nez spectacles resting low on his nose, a full dark beard and mustache neatly shaped, and dark hair swept back from a broad forehead, with a dark coat and waistcoat over a white shirt and a loosely knotted patterned cravat secured with a small pin. His expression is serious and intent, the gaze directed off-camera with the focused quality of a man accustomed to sustained concentration. The strong tonal contrast between the dark background at the upper left and the lighter ground at the right gives the composition a dramatic, painterly quality.

No photographer's imprint is visible on either face of the card. The reverse bears two penciled notations: Zola at the top in a casual hand, and below in a different hand Zola Emile / 1840–1902 / Author / Fr. Novelist, confirming the identification and dates.

Émile Zola (1840–1902) was the founder of French literary Naturalism and the author of the twenty-novel Rougon-Macquart cycle, a panoramic study of heredity and environment under the Second Empire encompassing Germinal, Nana, L'Assommoir, La Bête Humaine, and Au Bonheur des Dames. His open letter J'accuse, published in 1898 during the Dreyfus Affair, forced him into a year of exile in England and established him as one of the great exemplars of the writer as political conscience.

The reverse bears penciled inscriptions reading Zola and Zola Emile / 1840–1902 / Author / Fr. Novelist with no photographer's imprint and dealer code 1/20/10 / COLAEZ / Eb.