Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the most widely read American poet of the nineteenth century, is shown here in a three-quarter seated pose, his hands resting quietly in his lap with a small cylindrical object held loosely in one hand, his gaze directed slightly left of camera with a composed and settled expression. No photographer's imprint appears on the front or reverse of the plain cream mount. The reverse bears two pencil inscriptions: "Ole Bull" in larger cursive at the top, partially erased, and "Longfellow" in a smaller hand below it. The second inscription is correct. Comparison with confirmed photographic portraits of Longfellow from the late 1870s and early 1880s confirms the identification decisively: the broad full face, the voluminous white beard covering the entire jaw and chin and merging with the heavy white hair swept back from the forehead, and the particular mass and texture of white that frames the face as an almost continuous field are the defining visual characteristics of Longfellow's well-documented appearance in his final decade. No other figure in the Boston and Cambridge literary world of the period presents this precise combination.

Longfellow appears in a dark double-breasted coat worn open over a matching waistcoat with closely spaced buttons, a white collar visible at the throat beneath a loosely knotted dark cravat. His white hair is swept back from the broad forehead in full waves. The beard is dense and wide, covering the jaw completely, the mustache blending into it without a visible boundary. He sits in a carved wooden armchair, its upper rail visible at right. The image is vignetted softly at the shoulders on a plain cream cabinet card mount with no ruled border or studio printing on either face, consistent with American cabinet card production of the mid to late 1870s, the period to which this portrait belongs given that Longfellow died in March 1882.

Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine in 1807, educated at Bowdoin College alongside Nathaniel Hawthorne, and after extensive study in Europe accepted a professorship of modern languages at Harvard in 1836, a post he held until 1854 when he retired to devote himself entirely to writing. He lived out his remaining years at Craigie House in Cambridge, the Revolutionary War headquarters of George Washington, which his father-in-law had given to him and his second wife Frances Appleton as a wedding gift in 1843. The death of Frances in 1861, when her dress caught fire from a candle, was a catastrophe from which Longfellow never fully recovered, and it was said that he grew his famous beard in part to conceal the burns he sustained trying to extinguish the flames. By the time this portrait was made he was among the most celebrated literary figures in the English-speaking world, equally famous in Britain as in America, and in 1884, two years after his death, he became the first American honored with a memorial bust in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey.

His major works had long since passed into the common inheritance of American readers: "Evangeline," "The Song of Hiawatha," "The Courtship of Miles Standish," "Paul Revere's Ride," and "A Psalm of Life" were memorized by schoolchildren across the country for generations. He had been James Russell Lowell's predecessor as Smith Professor at Harvard and was a central figure in the same Cambridge literary circle that included Emerson, Holmes, and Whittier. Ole Bull, the Norwegian violinist whose name was erroneously written and then erased on this card's reverse, was himself a frequent visitor to that circle and a personal friend of Longfellow, which likely explains how the confusion arose in the first place.