The young merchant is shown in his office, behind a table covered with a cloth of Eastern design, with the various objects that he requires in his business scattered in front of him and about the room. Among them is a graceful Venetian glass holding carnations. Papers and letters are fastened to the walls, one of which he is just opening, upon which can be read the address: “To the honourable Georg Gisze, my brother, in London, England.” On the wall hangs a paper with his motto: “Nulla sine merore voluptas.” He has fair hair, and is dressed in red, with black cap and overcoat, and a white shirt with a collar of Spanish work. All the accessories, whether of silk, or linen, or gold, or steel, or glass, are painted with a fidelity to nature never excelled by the Dutchmen or Flemings of the following century, who devoted their whole career to the rendering of still-life. In Holbein’s work, however, this elaboration of detail is soon forgotten in the fascination which the vivid representation of the sitter’s personality produces in the spectator and the power displayed by the artist in seizing the essentials of a character. [Illustration: _Hanfstängl photo._] [_Berlin._ GEORG GISZE, MERCHANT OF THE STEELYARD] Ruskin has described this portrait for us in words so eloquent and so glowing (_Cornhill Magazine_, March, 1860) that no excuse is needed for quoting a sentence or two here: “Every accessory is perfect with a fine perfection: the carnations in the glass vase by his side; the ball of gold, chased with blue enamel, suspended on the wall; the books, the steelyard, the papers on the table, the seal-ring with its quartered bearings--all intensely there, and there in beauty of which no one could have dreamed that even flowers or gold were capable, far less parchment or steel. But every change of shade is felt, every rich and rubied line of petal followed, every subdued gleam in the soft blue of the enamel and bending of the gold touched with a hand whose patience of regard creates rather than paints. The jewel itself was not so precious as the rays of enduring light which form it, beneath that errorless hand. The man himself what he was--not more; but to all conceivable proof of sight, in all aspect of life or thought--not less. He sits alone in his accustomed room, his common work laid out before him; he is conscious of no presence, assumes no dignity, bears no sudden or superficial look of care or interest, lives only as he lived--but for ever. It is inexhaustible. Every detail of it wins, retains, rewards the attention with a continually increasing sense of wonderfulness. It is also wholly true. So far as it reaches, it contains the absolute facts of colour, form, and character, rendered with an unaccusable faithfulness.”