American poet and newspaper editor William Cullen Bryant is portrayed in a commanding oval vignette bust cabinet card by A. Bogardus, Broadway at 27th Street, New York, with the subject's name printed in elegant serif type on the front mount below the image: William Cullen Bryant. Bryant appears in extreme old age, his face turned slightly upward and to his left with an expression of dignified composure, his long white beard spreading broadly across the lower frame and his white hair swept loosely back from a high bald forehead. He wears a dark coat with a white shirt visible at the open collar, and the oval vignette format softens the composition against the plain card ground.

The portrait captures Bryant in the final years of his life, likely in the mid-to-late 1870s, and the Bogardus studio at Broadway and 27th Street was among the most prominent portrait establishments in New York during this period. The strong tonal contrast between Bryant's white hair and beard and the dark background gives the image a patriarchal gravitas befitting his public standing.

William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) was the first major American poet and one of the most influential newspaper editors of the nineteenth century. His poem Thanatopsis, written when he was seventeen and published in 1817, established him immediately as a poet of the first rank, and his later work To a Waterfowl, The Yellow Violet, and A Forest Hymn confirmed his place as the leading voice of American nature poetry before Whitman. As editor and co-owner of the New York Evening Post for nearly fifty years, he championed abolition, free trade, and the candidacy of Abraham Lincoln, shaping public opinion on the defining issues of his era.

The reverse bears a penciled notation reading J.R. Lowell and dealer code 11/26/13 / LOABCZ, suggesting a prior collector's mislabeling.