The exquisite miniatures, “little pictures to be held in the hand,” painted in watercolor on vellum by the English artist Nicholas Hilliard, are for many the quintessential images of the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages. On the four hundredth anniversary of his death, Elizabeth Goldring's excellent and beautifully illustrated monograph brings together important new research on Hilliard's life and work, adding considerably to our understanding of the challenges and opportunities that existed for painters in sixteenth-century London.
Hilliard was born in Exeter ca. 1547 into a staunchly Protestant family of goldsmiths. In 1555, during the reign of the Catholic Mary I, Hilliard and his family went into exile, first to Wesel, then Frankfurt, and finally Geneva, before returning to London in 1559, the year after Elizabeth I became monarch. He was apprenticed to the goldsmith Robert Brandon (eventually marrying his daughter), and subsequently set up his own workshop. How and with whom he trained as a miniaturist is unknown, but by 1572 he was commissioned to paint his first miniature of Elizabeth (National Portrait Gallery, London); its round format, with the sitter's head and shoulders turned slightly to right, positioned against a blue (“bice”) background and framed with calligraphic gold lettering, established the key characteristics of Hilliard's style.
In 1576 he traveled to France, partly to seek new patrons, but also, as Goldring suggests, perhaps to provide the queen with miniatures of the Duke of Anjou, with whom she had an unsuccessful ten-year courtship. He may also have been an intelligencer—a spy—with the French he had acquired in Geneva potentially useful. Two years later he was back in London working from his Gutter Lane workshop that would be his base for the next thirty-five years. He began to establish himself as the leading painter in England, producing not only numerous miniatures for the Queen and leading courtiers but also paintings in large, designs for seals and medals, and prints and miscellaneous decorative paintings, although seemingly no goldsmith products. By the mid-1590s, perhaps from competition from his former pupil Isaac Oliver, Hilliard widened his clientele to include prosperous city merchants and their wives, and experimented with different backgrounds and formats. After Elizabeth's death, in 1603, he was appointed limner to her successor, James I, but not to the new queen, Anne of Denmark, or Henry Prince of Wales, who both preferred the more avant-garde Italianate work of Oliver.
Financially inept, with frequent money shortages and schemes to make himself rich, such as a failed investment in a Scottish gold mining project, and probably living beyond his means with a large family to support, Hilliard was much more fortunate in his powerful patrons, such as the Earl of Leicester and Robert Cecil. His aspirations to be seen as a gentleman are evident in his 1577 Self-Portrait (Victoria & Albert Museum, London), as well as from comments in The Arte of Limning, which he wrote between 1598 and 1603, although never published, about the superiority of miniature painting.
Hilliard was celebrated in his own lifetime both in England and on the Continent at a time when, Goldring notes, the identities of many contemporary artists were unknown and when art production in London was dominated by émigré artists, and his work was collected soon after his death. To his friend, the writer Richard Haydocke, who produced a partial translation of Lomazzo's Trattato dell'arte della pittura, scoltura et architettura in 1598, he was (rather pretentiously) the Raphael of his age, while the poet Pierre de Ronsard, whom Hilliard knew in France, considered his work to be of “high perfection.”
Nicholas Hilliard: Life of an Artist is a richly rewarding addition to the already extensive published material on Hilliard and, benefiting from recent technical discoveries, it also contributes meticulously researched new archival information, as, for example, the early period of Continental exile. The backdrop of London's development as a cultural and artistic center, and the growing opportunities to see European art in aristocratic collections such as Leicester's, are skillfully contextualized. Goldring wears her extensive scholarship lightly and is to be highly commended for writing a book that makes a significant contribution to early modern studies.
