American poet Walt Whitman is portrayed in a close bust CDV by Gurney & Son, Fifth Avenue, New York, in one of the celebrated late portraits that established his iconic visual identity in American literary culture. Whitman faces the camera in a near-frontal pose, his voluminous white hair and full white beard filling the lower frame, his open shirt collar visible beneath a loosely worn jacket with no tie or cravat — a deliberately informal presentation that set him apart from the formal studio conventions of his contemporaries. The expression is open and benevolent, the eyes clear and direct.

The warm albumen tone of the print, mounted on Gurney's standard plain card stock, gives the image a softness that complements Whitman's unhurried and natural bearing. Gurney & Son was among the most prominent portrait studios in New York, and the Whitman sittings produced there became among the most widely circulated photographic likenesses of the poet during his lifetime.

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) was the most formally radical and visionary poet of the American nineteenth century, author of Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855 and expanded through multiple editions over the following decades. His free verse celebration of democracy, the body, and the American landscape in poems including "Song of Myself," "I Sing the Body Electric," and "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" transformed the possibilities of American poetry. His Civil War nursing service and elegies for Abraham Lincoln, including "O Captain! My Captain!" and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," deepened his standing as a national poet. The reverse bears a penciled inscription "Walt Whitman" with the Gurney imprint and dealer code "7/03/10 / 10ABCZ / Eb."