Ralph Waldo Emerson, the philosopher, essayist, and poet whose work defined American Transcendentalism and shaped a generation of writers and thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic, is shown here in a pure left profile, the pose Warren favored for this sitter, by George Kendall Warren at his studio at 445 Washington Street, Boston. The subject is identified in pencil in a period hand at the top of the reverse: "EMERSON." The mount is printed in brown script on the reverse: "Warren's Portraits / 445 Washington St. / Boston." Warren held the copyright on several Emerson portraits made in the 1870s, and the Smithsonian Institution holds a related Warren Emerson cabinet card dated 1876; this example, with its 445 Washington Street address, dates from within Warren's active Boston period before his death in 1884.

Emerson appears in strict left profile, his face turned completely away from the camera, the strong architectural line of his nose and brow fully visible against the plain light ground. His hair is white and swept back behind the ear, thinning at the crown. A short white beard covers the chin and jaw. He wears a dark coat with wide lapels, a white shirt collar turned down, and a loosely knotted dark cravat tied in a full bow at the throat. The image is vignetted softly at the shoulders, the portrait cropped just below the chest. The mount is plain cream stock with no border ruled line on the front, consistent with Warren's cabinet card format of the period.

Emerson was born in Boston in 1803, educated at Harvard, and served briefly as a Unitarian minister before leaving the pulpit in 1832 following the death of his first wife. He settled in Concord, Massachusetts, and spent the remainder of his life writing and lecturing, becoming the central figure of the Transcendentalist movement whose members included Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Bronson Alcott. His essays "Self-Reliance," "The American Scholar," and "Nature" established the philosophical foundations of an American intellectual identity independent of European tradition, and his influence extended to Walt Whitman, Friedrich Nietzsche, and William James. By the time Warren made this portrait Emerson was in his seventies and his memory was beginning to fail, a decline that would worsen through his final years before his death in Concord in April 1882.

George Kendall Warren, born in 1824 and active from 1851, was the preeminent Boston celebrity and institutional photographer of his generation, holding the class photography contracts for Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Brown, Williams, and Rutgers, and photographing virtually every major literary, political, and intellectual figure who passed through Boston in the 1860s and 1870s. His portrait subjects included Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Sumner, Frederick Douglass, and Bjornstjerne Bjornson, and his Emerson sittings produced some of the most widely circulated photographic likenesses of the philosopher made in his final decade. After Warren's death in 1884 his studio and negatives passed to C.F. Conly, who continued to print and sell portraits from Warren's negatives.