Nicholas Hilliard

• 1. Introduction

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  Nicholas Hilliard, the English goldsmith and miniature painter born in Exeter around 1547, spent forty-five years at the heart of two royal courts without ever quite escaping debt. His tiny oval portraits of Elizabeth I and her courtiers became so identified with the age that scholars later called him "the central artistic figure of the Elizabethan age, the only English painter whose work reflects, in its delicate microcosm, the world of Shakespeare's earlier plays." That reputation was built on works seldom larger than a few inches across, painted on vellum with a squirrel-hair brush so fine it was called a pencil. How did a goldsmith's son from Devon become the face of a monarchy? And why, despite royal favour and decades of work, did he die having just written his will on Christmas Eve 1618, leaving twenty shillings to the poor of his parish?

• 2. Exeter to Geneva

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  Richard Hilliard, Nicholas's father, was a goldsmith who became Sheriff of Exeter in 1568 and a staunch Protestant. That religious commitment shaped his son's earliest years in ways no one could have predicted. When the Catholic Queen Mary I took the throne, the leading Exeter Protestant John Bodley went into exile on the Continent, and young Nicholas went with the household. On the 8th of May 1557, a ten-year-old boy named Nicholas Hilliard was recorded in Geneva as part of an eleven-strong Bodley family group attending a Calvinist service presided over by John Knox. The Calvinism did not stick with him, but something else did: fluent French, which would prove indispensable later. John Bodley's son Thomas, two years older than Hilliard, pursued an intensive classical education under leading Geneva scholars during those years. Whether Nicholas received similar schooling is not known, but the exposure to a Protestant intellectual circle at that formative age left its mark. By the time he was thirteen, in 1560, he had already painted a self-portrait, and he is said to have painted a portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots, when he was eighteen.

• 3. Trade, Marriage, and the Crown

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  Hilliard apprenticed to Robert Brandon, the Queen's jeweller and city chamberlain of London, and completed seven years of training before being made a freeman of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths in 1569. Sir Roy Strong has suggested that during this period Hilliard may also have been taught limning by Levina Teerlinc, who had become court painter to Henry VIII after Holbein's death. Teerlinc was the daughter of Simon Bening, the last great master of the Flemish manuscript illumination tradition, so that training would have connected Hilliard to one of the most prestigious lineages in Northern European art. On the 15th of July 1576, at St Vedast church in Foster Lane, London, Hilliard married Brandon's daughter Alice, born in 1556. They would have seven children together. His first known miniature of Elizabeth I is dated 1572, and already by 1573 the Queen had granted him the reversion of a lease in recognition of his "good, true and loyal service." The route to Court had likely come through a "booke of portraitures" he made in 1571 for Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester, the Queen's favourite. Several of Hilliard's children were later named after Leicester and members of his circle.

• 4. Paris and Its Aftermath

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  In 1576, newly married and already attached to the English court, Hilliard left for France. The English Ambassador in Paris, Sir Amyas Paulet, reported carefully that Hilliard had gone "with no other intent than to increase his knowledge by this voyage, and upon hope to get a piece of money of the lords and ladies here for his better maintenance in England at his return." Hilliard stayed with Paulet for much of the time and moved through the artistic circles around the French court, staying with Germain Pilon and George of Ghent, who were respectively the Queen's sculptor and painter. He met the poet Ronsard, who gave him what might be described as a double-edged compliment: "the islands indeed seldom bring forth any cunning man, but when they do it is in high perfection." Under the name "Nicholas Belliart, peintre anglois," Hilliard appears in the papers of Francois, Duke of Anjou, a suitor of Queen Elizabeth, receiving a stipend of 200 livres in 1577. That year he also painted the miniature of Madame de Sourdis, then a maid of honour at the French court. He remained in France until 1578-79, and the two large panel portraits recently identified at Waddesdon Manor of Sir Amias Paulet and Elizabeth, painted on French oak rather than the Baltic oak common in England, are now believed to date from this period. Back in England, he settled in Gutter Lane, off Cheapside, from 1579 onwards, and the opening of his shop there is described by Roy Strong as "a revolution" that broadened the clientele for miniatures beyond the Court to the gentry, and eventually to well-off city merchants.

• 5. Money, Monopoly, and Misfortune

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  Around 1574, Hilliard invested in a gold mine in Scotland with Cornelius de Vos and lost money. He still remembered the episode bitterly twenty-five years later, describing it as a potential scam. The price of a miniature in his market was typically around £3; a portrait of the Earl of Northumberland cost exactly that in 1586, which compares with the £1 Cornelis Ketel charged for a head-and-shoulders portrait in the 1570s. In 1599, after decades of financial strain, Hilliard secured an annual allowance from Elizabeth of £40. In July 1601, he wrote to the Secretary of State Robert Cecil acknowledging that annuity but asking permission to leave London and live more cheaply in the countryside, explaining that apprentices he had trained were now competing with him in the private painting market. His father-in-law Brandon, who died in 1591, had so little confidence in Hilliard's financial judgment that his will arranged for Alice to receive her inheritance as an allowance administered by the Goldsmiths' Company rather than given directly to her husband. The same year Brandon died, the Queen gave Hilliard £400 after he completed a second Great Seal. In 1617, Hilliard finally obtained from James I something Elizabeth had refused him in 1584: a monopoly on producing miniatures and engravings of the monarch. Despite that prize, he was briefly imprisoned in Ludgate Prison that same year after standing surety for another man's debt and being unable to cover the amount.

• 6. The Art of Limning

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  Hilliard wrote a treatise on miniature painting, now known as The Art of Limning, composed around 1600 and preserved in the Bodleian Library. The masters he cites in that text are Hans Holbein the Younger, court painter to Henry VIII, and Albrecht Durer, whom he knew mainly through prints; both were dead before Hilliard was born. In the treatise, Hilliard records a revealing passage about the open light that Elizabeth preferred for sitting: "Her Majesty.. chose her place to sit for that purpose in the open alley of a goodly garden, where no tree was near, nor any shadow at all." This anti-shadow preference shaped the minimal chiaroscuro that characterises his style. Hilliard's technique involved preparing flesh-coloured blanks in different shades in advance, then using a very fine squirrel-hair brush to lay the outlines of features before filling them with faint hatchings. For jewellery and lace, he exploited thick dots of paint to cast tiny shadows that gave pearls and fabric a three-dimensional effect. He emphasised in the treatise the importance of catching transient expression: "these lovely graces, witty smilings, and these stolen glances which suddenly like lightning pass and another countenance taketh place." His style showed little development after the 1570s. From the 1590s, his former pupil Isaac Oliver became a direct competitor; Oliver was appointed Limner to Queen Anne of Denmark in 1604 and to Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales in 1610. Oliver had absorbed more modern continental influence and excelled at perspective, but Hilliard retained his reputation for freshness and psychological penetration that his pupil could not match.

• 7. Objects, Documents, and Legacy

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  Hilliard's role as a goldsmith ran alongside his painting throughout his career. He produced elaborate jewelled lockets for miniatures, worn around the neck as personal devotional objects. The Lyte Jewel, now in the British Museum, was given by James I to the courtier Thomas Lyte in 1610. Elizabeth gave the Armada Jewel to Sir Thomas Heneage and the Drake Jewel to Sir Francis Drake. Elizabeth herself kept her own collection of miniatures locked in a cabinet in her bedroom, wrapped in paper and labelled; the one marked "My Lord's picture" held a portrait of Leicester. Hilliard's appointment as royal limner extended to illuminated manuscripts as well: he was commissioned to decorate the founding charter of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, dated 1584, with an enthroned Elizabeth set within a Flemish-style Renaissance ornamental framework. As a New Year's gift in 1584, he presented the Queen with a picture of the story of the five wise and foolish virgins. The poet John Donne praised his work in a 1597 poem called The Storm. Hilliard died before the 7th of January 1619 and was buried that day at St Martin-in-the-Fields, Westminster. He left his son Laurence as sole executor. Laurence had already taken over the Gutter Lane workshop in 1613 and carried on his father's business for many decades, though Roy Strong describes his style as a "feeble" version of his father's. The largest collection of Hilliard's surviving work is held by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.