French author Alexandre Dumas fils is portrayed in a three-quarter bust CDV published by Anthony, 501 Broadway, New York, showing the French novelist and playwright in middle age in a dark coat with wide lapels and a white cravat, his expression animated and his body turned slightly toward the camera with one arm folded across his chest. His hair is dark and full, his features broad and strongly defined, and the pose has an informal energy that distinguishes it from more stiffly formal studio likenesses of the period.

The Anthony imprint on the reverse is printed upside down, suggesting the card was mounted in an album and the reverse notation was added after the fact. A penciled notation reads A. Dumas / Novelist. The Anthony publishing house at 501 Broadway, New York, distributed portrait CDVs of international literary and public figures widely during the 1860s and 1870s.

Alexandre Dumas fils (1824–1895), son of the celebrated Alexandre Dumas père, achieved independent literary fame as a novelist and playwright, most notably for La Dame aux Camélias (1848), which he adapted for the stage and which became the basis for Verdi's opera La Traviata. He was elected to the Académie française in 1874 and was regarded in his own time as the leading French playwright of the later nineteenth century, championing social realism in drama and writing extensively on marriage, adultery, and the condition of women in French society.

The reverse bears a penciled inscription reading A. Dumas / Novelist with the Anthony publisher's imprint upside down and dealer code 5/03/15 / DOLF.