Two albumen cartes-de-visite document First Beach in Newport, Rhode Island, both photographed by Joshua Appleby Williams from his Photograph Room on South Touro Street, Newport, with one card bearing his full printed imprint and a manuscript inscription reading "The First Beach, Newport R.I." on the reverse, and the second carrying only a double-rule border with no imprint. First Beach, also known as Easton's Beach, was Newport's primary public bathing ground and one of the most fashionable seaside destinations on the New England coast during the resort era of the 1860s and 1870s.

The first view looks along the length of the beach from an elevated position on the seawall, showing a rip-rap stone revetment running diagonally from foreground to middle distance, a raised roadway with a balustrade railing at left, and a crowd of bathers, carriages, and figures gathered near bathhouses and small structures at the far end. The second view is taken from the rocky shoreline looking across the cove toward a large multi-story resort hotel with a cupola and wrap around porches, flanked by smaller outbuildings, with a rocky beach and tidal flats in the foreground.

The imprint on the reverse of the first card identifies the studio as Joshua Appleby Williams' Photograph Room, formerly Wm. Vose's Ice Cream Saloon, Sign of the Red Cart, South Touro Street, near Bath Road, Newport, R.I., one of the more colorful studio identifications in New England CDV photography.