The painting is an inventory in oil. On the table in front of the merchant: a folded letter, addressed to him ("To the honourable Georg Gisze in London, in England, to my brother"), a glass vase of carnations and rosemary (symbols of betrothal; Gisze was engaged when the portrait was painted), a pewter inkwell, a brass weighing scale, a desk seal in red wax, a glass desk clock, a string of keys, a leather-bound ledger, balls of string. On the wall behind him, more papers pinned at angles, a row of small books, a string-and-wax-sealed packet. Holbein has shown every instrument of the merchant's working day, every tool the day requires, every document the day produces.

This is a particular and not universal way of painting a person. Seventeenth-century portraitists painted their sitters surrounded by emblems of status, learning, or rank. Holbein, working a century earlier, surrounded Gisze with the equipment of his actual trade. The choice was deliberate. Gisze was a Hanseatic merchant from Danzig (now Gdańsk), working out of the Stalhof on the north bank of the Thames just west of London Bridge, where the Hanseatic League had run its London operations since the thirteenth century. The League's merchants identified themselves through their work, not through inherited title. They were European-mobile, polyglot, mercantile professionals operating outside the courts of the cities where they did business. Holbein painted Gisze among his tools because the tools were the man's identity.

The Latin motto inscribed in the upper left of the panel reads Nulla sine merore voluptas, no pleasure without sorrow. The line is conventional Renaissance moralising; the conventional reading would be that Gisze's worldly success is shadowed by the inevitability of death. The harder reading, given the visible engagement with the tools of trade and the betrothal flowers in the vase, is that the motto is not a warning. It is a working-class merchant's accurate description of the trade itself. The pleasure of accomplishment in long-distance commerce is the pleasure of having outrun, for the moment, the structural risks that the trade depends on. Gisze knew this. So did Holbein. Both were professionals operating outside the systems of inherited rank that would have made the moralising perfunctory, and the painting carries the seriousness of two men who actually understood what the motto meant.

The painting hangs at the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin. Holbein painted several of Gisze's Hanseatic colleagues in succession; this one is the most carefully composed and the most psychologically intact. It is the founding portrait of mercantile professionalism in European art, and the model for what bourgeois Dutch portraiture would become a century later.