John Greenleaf Whittier is portrayed in a close bust cabinet card by Thompson of Amesbury, Massachusetts, showing the Quaker poet in his later years in an intimate and sympathetic composition made at the studio nearest to his longtime home. Whittier appears in old age, his face clean-shaven and deeply lined, his white hair receding from a broad forehead with a fringe of white curls at the sides, wearing a dark coat and a large black cravat over a white shirt. His expression is composed and direct, his dark eyes beneath heavy brows giving the portrait a quality of austere moral presence. The composition vignettes softly at the shoulders against a plain warm ground, and the Thompson studio imprint appears in elegant script on the front mount below the image.

Whittier resided in Amesbury from 1836 until the final years of his life, and Thompson's studio was the natural choice for local portrait sittings of the town's most celebrated resident. The reverse bears the pink geometric-patterned cardstock with a penciled inscription reading John Greenleaf Whittier / Author, Abolitionist Quaker and an oval dealer stamp for Earles Galleries, 816 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia.

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892) was the preeminent Quaker poet of the American nineteenth century and a cornerstone of the antislavery movement, whose verse and editorial work helped shape public sentiment against slavery before the Civil War. His masterwork Snow-Bound (1866) secured his literary reputation beyond his political work, and poems including Maud Muller, Barbara Frietchie, and The Barefoot Boy entered the popular American imagination. He lived most of his adult life in Amesbury and died in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, in 1892.

The reverse bears a penciled inscription reading John Greenleaf Whittier / Author, Abolitionist Quaker, an Earles Galleries Philadelphia dealer stamp at 816 Chestnut Street, and dealer code 4/10/09 / LOABXZ / Eb.