French author Alexandre Dumas père and the American actress Adah Isaacs Menken are portrayed together in a striking double-figure CDV by S.M. Fassett, Artistic Photography, 114 South Clark Street, Chicago, showing the elderly novelist seated with Menken positioned behind him, her arm draped across his shoulder and her costumed figure leaning intimately against his back. Dumas appears in a dark suit and waistcoat, his white hair and broad features immediately recognizable, while Menken wears a theatrical costume with a lace or embroidered collar and her dark hair loose. The composition is candid and physically close, projecting the familiarity between the two subjects.

A handwritten slip attached to the lot identifies the image as Alexander Dumas circa 1866 with his mistress the actress Adah Isaacs Menken. The Fassett studio in Chicago was a well-regarded portrait establishment, and this image was likely produced during Menken's American theatrical engagements or distributed from a photograph taken in Paris during the period of their known association.

Alexandre Dumas père (1802–1870) was the most widely read French novelist of the nineteenth century, author of The Three Musketeers (1844) and The Count of Monte Cristo (1844–1846), works that remain among the most translated and adapted in world literature. Adah Isaacs Menken (1835–1868) was one of the most celebrated and controversial actresses of her era, famous for her scandalous stage performance in Mazeppa and for her relationships with prominent literary figures including Dumas, Swinburne, and Théophile Gautier. Their relationship during Menken's Paris engagement in 1866–67 attracted wide press attention on both sides of the Atlantic.

The reverse bears a penciled inscription reading Alex. Dumas with the S.M. Fassett studio imprint in green and dealer code LOCEEZ.