Robert Louis Stevenson is portrayed in a three-quarter seated cabinet card at a writing desk, the reverse bearing the penciled inscription Robt. Louis Stevenson, showing the Scottish novelist in his early to middle thirties in a candid and atmospheric composition. Stevenson sits at a small writing table with a pen in his right hand poised over a notebook or manuscript, an inkwell set visible at the left edge of the desk, and his body turned toward the camera with a direct and intense gaze. He wears a dark frock coat over a white shirt and dark tie, his dark hair parted at the center and falling to his collar, and a full mustache defines his lean features. The background is dramatically uneven with strong tonal variation, giving the portrait a painterly atmospheric quality. A faint inscription in the lower right of the front mount appears to be a partial signature or studio notation but is not fully legible.

The writing pose with pen in hand and inkwell present is a deliberate compositional choice associating the subject with literary production, and the overall atmospheric treatment gives the portrait a Romantic character suited to Stevenson's own self-presentation. No photographer's studio imprint is visible on either face of the card.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) was one of the most widely read British authors of the late nineteenth century, celebrated for Treasure Island (1883), Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Kidnapped (1886), and A Child's Garden of Verses (1885). His chronic ill health drove him from Scotland to France, the Swiss Alps, the American West, and ultimately to Samoa, where he died at his estate Vailima at the age of forty-four. His travel writing, essays, and correspondence were as admired by contemporaries as his fiction.

The reverse bears a penciled inscription reading Robt. Louis Stevenson with no photographer's imprint and dealer code 8/14/14 / LOCDFZ / Eb.