A portrait drawing of a man shown in profile to the left on pink prepared paper. The sitter wears a cap with a feather. The drawing is in coloured chalks, heavily worked up in black inks. Some of the outlines have been traced over with a stylus for transfer to panel.

An eighteenth-century inscription (a copy of a mid-sixteenth-century original) along the bottom edge identifies the sitter as 'S. George of Cornwall'.

The subkect of this striking drawing remains a mystery. Although traditionally identified as 'Simon George of Cornwall', there are no traces of a contemporary of that name and the eighteenth-century inscription on which the identification is based may be a mistranscription. George Vertue, who recorded the drawings when they were hanging at Kensington Palace in 1743, listed this sitter as 'Sir George Cornwall', and he may be the naval commander of that name who was knighted in 1544 and died in 1562.

This is a study for the panel in the Städel Museum in Frankfurt (Inv. 1065). The finished painting is a roundel and although the main contours follow the drawing, it portrays the sitter with a full beard which is absent from the drawing and with differing dress. The sitter in the Frankfurt panel holds a carnation and it has been suggested that this is a marriage portrait (see, for example, Maryan Ainsworth, 'Paternes for Phisioneamye': Holbein's portraiture reconsidered', Burlington Magazine, 132, March 1990, pp. 173–86).  If the tentatie identification of the sitter as George Cornwall is correct, then the portrait would be one of the last made by Holbein, since Cornwall married Mary Brydges, who appears to have been his first wife, in 1543.