A seated three-quarter figure portrait of Alexandre Dumas fils, the French author and playwright whose novel La Dame aux Camélias gave rise to Verdi's opera La traviata, photographed in London by Oscar Gustav Rejlander at his Victoria Street studio in the early 1870s. The subject is identified in a contemporary pencil inscription on the reverse, and the mount is signed in ink by the photographer in his characteristic hand: "O.G. Rejlander / 1 Albert Mansions / Victoria Street S.W." The mount is otherwise plain and unmarked on the front, consistent with Rejlander's practice at this address.

Dumas fils appears in dark frock coat, matching waistcoat with a visible watch chain, white shirt, and large bow tie, seated in a three-quarter turn with his right hand tucked into his lap and his left resting at his side. His expression is composed and direct, his dark curling hair receding at the temples, a full mustache across his upper lip. The image is printed on a plain cream mount with cut corners, the image itself softly vignetted at the edges in the standard carte-de-visite format.

Rejlander, born in Sweden and active in Britain from the 1850s, is widely regarded as one of the founding figures of art photography, known for his 1857 combination-print masterwork Two Ways of Life and for his portraits of Charles Darwin, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, among others. He moved to London in 1862 and established his Victoria Street studio, where his portrait clients included many of the most prominent intellectual and artistic figures of the day. Dumas fils, born in 1824, was at the height of his theatrical reputation in the early 1870s, having established himself as the leading French dramatist of his generation with works including La Femme de Claude and Monsieur Alphonse; he was admitted to the Académie française in 1874.