John Tenniel is portrayed in an oval vignette bust CDV by John & Charles Watkins, Photographers to the Queen, the Prince of Wales, and the Ex Royal Family of France, 34 Parliament Street, London, showing the illustrator as a young man in a relaxed pose facing slightly to his right. Tenniel wears a dark coat with a velvet collar and a white shirt with a loosely knotted cravat, his hair long and softly curling to his collar, and his expression is open and informal. The oval vignette format softens the edges of the composition against the plain card ground.

John & Charles Watkins operated one of London's most prestigious portrait studios, holding simultaneous royal warrants from the Queen, the Prince of Wales, and the exiled French imperial family, and their portrait series of British cultural and literary figures were widely collected and distributed. A penciled collector's notation on the reverse identifies the subject as John Tenniel Eng. Illustrator / 1820–1914.

John Tenniel (1820–1914) was the most celebrated British illustrator of the Victorian era, best known for his definitive illustrations for Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871), images so authoritative that they have defined the visual conception of Carroll's characters for over a century and a half. He served as principal political cartoonist for Punch magazine from 1851 to 1901, a fifty-year tenure during which his cartoons shaped British public opinion on the major political events of the Victorian age. He was knighted in 1893, the first British illustrator to receive the honor.

The reverse bears a penciled inscription reading John Tenniel Eng. Illustrator / 1820–1914 with the John & Charles Watkins studio imprint and dealer code 12/05/10 / LOCAXBZ / Eb.