John Greenleaf Whittier is portrayed in a close bust cabinet card issued as part of Bruckmann's Collection, distributed by Geo. Kirchner & Co., New York, with the subject's name WHITTIER typeset in large capital letters on the front mount below the image alongside the notations Déposé and Registered asserting copyright protection. Whittier appears in extreme old age, his face gaunt and deeply lined, his white hair receding to a thin fringe above his temples, wearing a dark coat with a black cravat over a white shirt with a high collar. His expression is penetrating and serious, his dark eyes beneath heavy overhanging brows giving the portrait an almost severe quality. The slightly dynamic turn of his head to the right and the warm tonal treatment of the image give the Bruckmann reproduction a quality of presence distinct from most studio portraits of the poet.

Bruckmann's Collection was a Munich-based publisher of high-quality photographic portrait reproductions distributed internationally, and Geo. Kirchner & Co. served as the New York distributor. The combination of Munich artistic production and New York retail distribution was a common arrangement for celebrity portrait series marketed to American collectors during the 1880s and 1890s.

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892) remained one of the most celebrated American poets of his generation well into his eighties, and the sustained demand for his portrait in multiple formats reflects the public's enduring attachment to the poet who had lived to see his antislavery work vindicated by the Civil War and his pastoral poetry embraced by a generation seeking connection to a vanishing New England world. Snow-Bound, Maud Muller, Barbara Frietchie, and The Barefoot Boy remained among the most widely read American poems of the era.

The reverse is plain card stock with no inscriptions and dealer code 5/24/03 / COLEZ / Eb.