Nicholas Hilliard

Nicholas Hilliard
Self-portrait, 1577
Nationality	English
Known for	Portrait miniatures
Patron(s)	Elizabeth I, James I

Nicholas Hilliard (c.1547 – bur. January 7, 1619) was an English goldsmith and limner best known for his portrait miniatures of members of the courts of Elizabeth I and James I of England. He mostly painted small oval miniatures, but also some larger ones, up to about ten inches tall, and at least the two famous half-length panel portraits of Elizabeth. He enjoyed continuing success as an artist, and continuing financial troubles, for forty-five years, and his paintings have continued to exemplify the visual image of Elizabethan England, very different from that of most of Europe in the late sixteenth century. Technically he was very conservative by European standards, but his paintings are suberbly executed and have a freshness and charm that has ensured his continuing reputation.

Early life and family

He was the son of Richard Hilliard (1519–1594) of Exeter, Devon, England, a strongly Protestant goldsmith who was high sheriff of the city and county in 1560, and Laurence, daughter of John Wall, a London goldsmith.

Hilliard may have been a close relative of Grace Hiller or Hilliar, first wife of Theophilus Eaton (1590–1657) the co-founder of New Haven Colony in America.

Unknown man of 24, 1572, 2 3/8 x 1 7/8 inches, V&A.

He appears to have been attached at a young age to the household of the leading Exeter Protestant John Bodley, father of Thomas Bodley who founded the Bodleian Library in Oxford. John Bodley went into exile on the accession of the Catholic Queen Mary I of England, and on May 8th 1557 Hilliard, then ten years old, was recorded in Geneva as one of an eleven-strong Bodley family group at a Calvinist service presided over by John Knox. Calvinism does not seem to have struck with Hilliard, but the fluent French he acquired abroad was later useful.

Hilliard painted a portrait of himself at the age of thirteen in 1560 and is said to have executed one of Mary Queen of Scots when he was eighteen years old.

Hilliard apprenticed himself to the Queen's jeweller Robert Brandon (d. 1591), , a goldsmith and city chamberlain of London, and at the end of his seven years' apprenticeship was made a freeman of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths in 1569. He set up a workshop with his younger brother John; another brother was also a goldsmith, and the youngest a clergyman. He married Brandon's daughter Alice (1556–1611) in 1576 and they had seven children.

Career

Royal limner

Miniature of Elizabeth I, 1572

Miniature of d'Alençon, 1577

Hilliard emerged from his apprenticeship at a time when new a royal portrait painter was "desperately needed". Two panel portraits long attribited to him, the "Phoenix" and "Pelican" portraits, are dated c. 1572-76. Hilliard was appointed limner (miniaturist) and goldsmith to Elizabeth I at an unknown date; his first known miniature of the Queen is dated 1572, and already in 1573 he was granted the reversion of a lease by the Queen for his "good, true and loyal service".

Despite this patronage, in 1576 the recently married Hilliard left for France "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" carefully reported the English Ambassador in Paris, Sir Amyas Paulet, with whom Hilliard stayed for much of the time. Francis Bacon was attached to the embassy, and Hilliard did a miniature of him in Paris. He remained until 1578-79, mixing in the artistic circles round the court, staying with Germain Pilon and George of Ghent the Queen's 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". He appears in the papers of the duc d'Alençon, a suitor of Queen Elizabeth, under the name of "Nicholas Belliart, peintre anglois," in 1577, receiving a stipend of 200 livres. The miniature of Madame de Sourdis, certainly the work of Hilliard, is dated 1577, in which year she was a maid of honour at the French court; and other portraits which are his work are believed to represent Gabrielle d'Estrées (niece of Madame de Sourdis), la princesse de Condé and Madame de Montgomery.

Money was a persistent problem for Hilliard. The typical price for a miniature seems to have been £3, although in 1599 he secured an annual allowance from the Queen of £40, and in 1617 managed to obtain a monopoly on producing miniatures and engravings of James I, something Elizabeth had refused in 1584. Nonetheless, he was briefly imprisoned in Ludgate Prison that year, after standing surety for the debt of another, and being unable to produce the amount. His father-in-law evidently had little trust in his financial acumen; his will of 1591 provided for his daughter by an allowance administered by the Goldsmiths' Company. 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

Later career

Large miniature of George Clifford, 3rd Earl of Cumberland by Hilliard, c. 1590, after his appointment as the Queen's Champion, in tilting attire with the Queen's glove as her favour pinned to his hat. 25.2 x 17.5 cm.

After his return from France he lived and worked in a house in Gutter Lane, off Cheapside, from 1579 to 1613, 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.

Apart from Laurence, who continued in a "feeble" version of his father's style, his pupils included Isaac Oliver, by far the most important, and Rowland Lockey. He appears to have given lessons to amateurs also; a letter from a young lady being "finished" in London in 1595 says: "For my drawing, I take an hour in the afternoon... My Lady.. telleth me, when she is well, that she will see if Hilliard will come and teach me, if she can by any means, she will.."

He continued to work as a goldsmith, and produced some spectacular "picture boxes" or jewelled lockets for miniatures, worn round the neck, such as the Lyte Jewel, which, typically, was given by James I (more generous in this respect than Elizabeth) to a courtier, Thomas Lyte, in 1610. The Armada Jewel, given by Elizabeth to Sir Thomas Heneage and the Drake Pendant given to Sir Francis Drake are the best known examples. As part of the cult of the Virgin Queen, courtiers were rather expected to wear the Queen's likeness, at least at Court. Elizabeth had her own collection of miniatures, kept locked in a cabinet in her bedroom, wrapped in paper and labelled, with the one labelled "My Lord's picture" containing a portrait of Leicester.

He was the author of an important treatise on miniature painting, now called The Art of Limning (c. 1600), preserved in the Bodleian Library. Although it was once believed that the author of that treatise was John de Critz, Serjeant Painter to James I, from instructions by Hilliard for the benefit of one of his pupils, perhaps Isaac Oliver, more recent scholarship holds that the Art "can be dated rather closely and established convincingly" as the work of Hilliard.

He was in high favour with James I as well as with Elizabeth, receiving from the king a special patent of appointment, dated May 5, 1617, granting him a sole licence for royal work for twelve years. James's more lavish presentation of portraits had its effect on the quality of the work from the Hilliard workshop. When the Earl of Rutland returned from an embassy to Denmark, sixteen members of his party were given chains of gold with the king's picture, and others received just a picture.

The esteem of his contemporaries for Hilliard is testified to by John Donne, who in a poem called The Storm (1597) praises the work of this artist. He died on about January 3, 1619 and was buried on January 7, 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.

By far the largest collection of his work is in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and the National Portrait Gallery has several. Most of his works remain in England. The conditions in which miniatures have kept ensure that many remain in excellent condition, and have avoided the attention of restorers.

Style

The masters mentioned in The Art of Limming are Hans Holbein the Younger, Henry VIII's court painter, and Albrecht Dürer, who he probably only knew from his prints. Both were dead by the time of Hilliard's birth, and in many respects he is more conservative even than Holbein. He also learnt from French art, including their chalk drawings. English art was distinctly provincial, and Hilliard's art is a world away from that of his early-Baroque Italian contemporaries, or his close contemporary El Greco (1541-1614).

In the Art of Limming he cautioned against all but the minimal use of chiaroscuro that we see in his works, reflecting the views of his patron Elizabeth: "seeing that best to show oneself needeth no shadow of place but rather the open light...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..."

His style shows little development, except that his later repetitions of James I and his family are much weaker than his early works.

Gallery

Panel portraits

• 
  Elizabeth I, the "Pelican" portrait, c. 1572
• 
  Elizabeth I, the "Phoenix" portrait,c. 1575

Portrait miniatures

• 
  Hilliard's wife Alice Brandon, 1578
• 
  Young Man Among Roses, 1588
• 
  Christopher Hatton c. 1589
• 
  Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke c. 1590

See also

• List of British artists

References

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
• Edmond, Mary Hilliard and Oliver: The Lives and Works of Two Great Miniaturists, Robert Hale, London, 1983
• Hearn, Karen, ed. Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England 1530-1630. New York: Rizzoli, 1995. ISBN 0-8478-1940-X
• Kinney, Arthur F.: Nicholas Hilliard's "Art of Limning", Northeastern University Press, 1983, ISBN 0930350316
• Reynolds, Graham: Nicholas Hilliard & Isaac Oliver, Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1971
• Roy Strong,Nicholas Hilliard, 1975, Michael Joseph Ltd, London, ISBN 0718113012
• Strong, Roy: Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I, Thames and Husdon, 1987, ISBN 0500250987