The portrait miniature depicts the Marquise de Pompadour wearing a blue dress, with powdered hair and a bouquet, sitting while holding a book and with a spaniel at her feet. It is set in a silver gilt frame, surmounted by a coronet and the Marquise de Pompadour's personal crest.
Inside the frame there are two pieces of paper, one of which contains handwritten lines from the poem 'The Rape of the Lock' by Alexander Pope (1714), and the other contains a description of the portrait along with other descriptions of items belonging to a former owner, F. Sanders Morris. The writing on the back of the frame reads 'this is a miniature after the painting by Boucher (now owned by Baron Adolph de Rothschild), a very beautiful example of the miniature art'.