Nicholas Hilliard was the first great native-born English painter of the Renaissance. He was best known for his tiny oval portrait miniatures of the Elizabethan court and its successor under James I.
Background
Nicholas Hilliard was born around 1547 in Exeter, Devon, England, the United Kingdom. He was a son of Richard Hilliard and Laurence (Wall) Hilliard. His father was a goldsmith, who became a staunch Protestant and was Sheriff of Exeter in 1568.
Nicholas was one of four boys: two others became goldsmiths, and one a clergyman. He had a tumultuous childhood due to the Reformation, the spread of Protestantism that occurred during the 16th century. His father, a proponent of the Reformed religion, sent him to Geneva to escape persecution in England. In Geneva the young Hilliard lived with the family of John Bodley—who would later become a publisher of the Geneva Bible—and was first exposed to the French language, French art, and a humanist education. He probably returned to England about 1559.
Education
Nicholas Hilliard was apprenticed as a goldsmith and jeweler, and began painting miniatures as a child. He is credited with painting the first known self-portrait at the age of thirteen.
Career
Nicholas Hilliard's earliest known attempts at miniature painting were made in 1560, and his talent is obvious in Self Portrait Aged 13 and Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset.
In 1570, he was appointed limner, or miniaturist, and goldsmith to Elizabeth I. In that capacity, he was responsible for engraving the Great Seal of England.
In 1571, he had made "a book of portraitures" for the Earl of Leicester, the Queen's favourite, which is likely to be how he became known to the Court. The next year, Hilliard painted his first dated portrait of Queen Elizabeth. One of his finest miniatures, it marks the arrival of the Elizabethan costume piece, that curiously insular product of a court by now culturally as well as politically isolated from Catholic Europe. The Queen is shown half-length, wearing a typically elaborate black dress with white embroidered sleeves and a small frill ruff, with a white rose pinned to her shoulder. Brightly coloured and evenly lit, with gold lettering surrounding the head over a blue background, the miniature is painted in watercolour on the back of a playing card, the queen of hearts.
Despite this patronage, in 1576 Hilliard went to France, where, in the service of the Duc d'Alençon, he was in close touch with the French court. One of Hilliard's best-known works, the Youth among Roses (ca. 1588), seems to echo in microcosm the courtly and artificial world of Shakespeare's early comedies. He remained until 1578–79, mixing in the artistic circles round the court, staying with Germain Pilon and George of Ghent, respectively the Queen's sculptor and painter, and meeting Ronsard, who perhaps paid him the rather double-edged compliment later quoted by Hilliard: "the islands indeed seldom bring forth any cunning man, but when they do it is in high perfection".
After his return from France he had invested in a scheme, or perhaps scam, for gold-mining in Scotland, which he still remembered bitterly twenty-five years later. During a low point in his finances, in July 1601 Nicholas wrote to the Secretary of State Robert Cecil acknowledging the annuity of £40 but asking permission to retire from London and live more cheaply in the countryside. He explained that he had trained apprentices who now competed with him in the private painting market. Hilliard asked that Cecil employ his son as a clerk because he could not keep him in his own trade.
Thus, from 1579 to 1613, Hilliard worked in a house in Gutter Lane, off Cheapside, when his son and pupil Laurence took it over, carrying on in business for many decades. Hilliard had moved to an unknown address in the parish of St Martins-in-the-Fields, out of the City and nearer the Court.
About 1600 Hilliard wrote the Treatise concerning the Art of Limning (published 1911-1912), partly consisting of technical hints and partly a theoretical treatise deriving from Italian mannerist art theory. At that time painters in England were still looked upon as craftsmen, and Hilliard insists on their status as practitioners of a liberal art. "None should meddle with limning," he writes, "but gentlemen alone." He goes on to record conversations with the Queen on portrait painting, which, they agree, is "best in plain lines without shadowing."
After Elizabeth's death in 1603 Hilliard worked for James I. But by this time his style was going out of fashion, to be superseded by the shadowed and more realistic approach of his pupils Isaac Oliver and Rowland Lockey. He continued to work as a goldsmith and produced some spectacular "picture boxes" or jewelled lockets for miniatures, worn around the neck, such as the Lyte Jewel in the British Museum, which, typically, was given by James I to a courtier, Thomas Lyte, in 1610.
Nicholas Hilliard died on about 3 January 1619 and was buried on 7 January 1619 in the church of St Martins-in-the-Fields, Westminster, leaving in his will twenty shillings to the poor of the parish, thirty between his two sisters, some goods to his maidservant, and all the rest of his effects to his son, Lawrence Hilliard, his sole executor.
Achievements
Nicholas Hilliard is the most celebrated of all practitioners of his art and a central figure in establishing the portrait miniature as a distinctive genre in Britain. His paintings still exemplify the visual image of Elizabeth of England, very different from that of most of Europe in the late sixteenth century.
Influenced by the work of Hans Holbein, Hilliard worked for Elizabeth I and James I and established the English school of miniature painting. The paintings were highly prized by the Queen. She gave likenesses of herself to those in high esteem and kept a collection of treasured portraits of her 'favourites'. Hilliard also painted the portraits of Mary, Queen of Scots, Francis Drake, Philip Sidney, and Walter Raleigh.
Nicholas Hilliard was also the author of an important treatise on miniature painting, now called The Art of Limning (c. 1600), preserved in the Bodleian Library.
By far the largest collection of his work is in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The National Portrait Gallery and British Museum in London have several others.
Hilliard has been attached at a young age to the household of the leading Exeter Protestant John Bodley, the father of Thomas Bodley who founded the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
Views
By the standards of the flat icon-like Tudor paintings Hilliard’s style was more delicate, slightly better modelled even if still predominantly free of heavy shadow, and reflected his travels to France where he learned from continental techniques. He painted with a lot more skill in miniature than many contemporary British artists did in a full-sized painting. Further, they were completed in watercolour on vellum which is a much more difficult medium to handle than oils, insofar as mistakes cannot be easily rectified. Hilliard was an admirer of the great painter Hans Holbein and his delicate technique, and wrote that "Holbein’s manner of limning (painting) I have ever imitated, and hold it for the best."
Quotations:
"...of all things the perfection is to imitate the face of mankind."
"Hei mihi quod tanto virtus perfusa decore non habet eternos inviolata dies' Alas, that so much virtue suffused with beauty should not last for ever inviolate."
"How then can the curious drawer watch, and as it were catch these lovely graces, witty smilings, and those stolen glances which suddenly like lightning pass, and another countenance taketh place, except to behold and very well note and conceit to like."
"A vacant mind invites dangerous inmates, as a deserted mansion tempts wandering outcasts to enter and take up their abode in its desolate apartments."
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"He painted with all the passionate conviction of the Renaissance artist who truly believed the face was the mirror of the soul." - Dr. Roy Strong
Interests
Artists
Hans Holbein
Connections
On July 15, 1576, Nicholas Hilliard married Alice Brandon (1556 – 1611). The couple had eight children.
Nicholas Hilliard
Nicholas Hillard has helped form our ideas of the appearance of Elizabeth I, Mary Queen on Scots. Sir Francis Drake and James I among others. His painted works open a remarkable window onto the highest levels of English/British society in the later years of the 16th century.
