Nicholas Hilliard
Nicholas Hilliard | |
---|---|
Born | 1547 Exeter, England |
Died | 7 January 1619 (aged 71–72) London, England |
Known for | Portrait miniatures |
Patron(s) | Elizabeth I, James I |
Nicholas Hilliard (c. 1547 – 7 January 1619) was an English
Early life and family
Hilliard was born in Exeter in 1547. He was the son of Richard Hilliard (1519–1594) of Exeter, Devon, also spelt Hellyer, a goldsmith who became a staunch Protestant and was Sheriff of Exeter in 1568,[2] by his marriage to Laurence, daughter of John Wall, a City of London goldsmith.[3] He was one of four boys: two others became goldsmiths, and one a clergyman.[4] Hilliard may have been a close relative of Grace Hiller (Hilliar), first wife of Theophilus Eaton (1590–1657), the co-founder of New Haven Colony in America.[5]
He appears to have been attached at a young age to the household of the leading Exeter Protestant John Bodley, the father of
Hilliard painted a portrait of himself at the age of 13 in 1560[7] and is said to have executed one of Mary, Queen of Scots, when he was eighteen years old.[5]
Hilliard apprenticed himself to the Queen's jeweller
Career
Royal limner
Hilliard emerged from his apprenticeship at a time when a new royal portrait painter was "desperately needed".[8] Two panel portraits long attributed 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;[9] 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."[10] In 1571 he had made "a booke of portraitures" for the Earl of Leicester, the Queen's favourite, which is likely to be how he became known to the Court; several of his children were named after Leicester and his circle.[11]
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
He appears in the papers of the
Money was a persistent problem for Hilliard. The typical price for a miniature seems to have been £3 – which compares well with prices charged by Cornelis Ketel in the 1570s of £1 for a head-and-shoulders portrait and £5 for a full-length.[14] A portrait of the Earl of Northumberland cost £3 in 1586.[15] Around the year 1574 Hilliard invested in a gold mine in Scotland with Cornelius de Vos and lost money.[16] In 1599 Hilliard 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. The same year the Queen gave him £400,[17] a large amount, after he made a second Great Seal, and perhaps bearing in mind that he had not had an annuity.
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.[18] During a low point in his finances, in July 1601 Hilliard 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.[19]
21st century research on two paintings at Waddesdon Manor has transformed our understanding of his work as two large-scale paintings have been newly attributed to him. The portraits, of Sir Amyas Paulet and Elizabeth, are painted on French oak panels, not the Baltic oak commonly used in England, and are thought to date to Hilliard's time in France. The new data support Sir Roy Strong's 1983 attribution of the portrait of Elizabeth to Hilliard.[20]
Later career
After his return from France he lived and worked in a house in Gutter Lane, off
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".[22]
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
His appointment as miniaturist to the Crown included the old sense of a painter of illuminated manuscripts and he was commissioned to decorate important documents, such as the founding charter of Emmanuel College, Cambridge (1584), which has an enthroned Elizabeth within an elaborate framework of Flemish-style Renaissance ornament. He also seems to have designed woodcut title-page frames and borders for books, some of which bear his initials.[25] As a New Year's day gift in 1584, Hilliard presented Queen Elizabeth with a picture of the story of five wise and foolish virgins.[26]
He was in high favour with James I as well as with Elizabeth, receiving from the king a special patent of appointment, dated 5 May 1617, granting him a sole licence for royal portraits in
The esteem of his contemporaries for Hilliard is testified to by
By far the largest collection of his work is in the
Style
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,[5] more recent scholarship holds that the Art "can be dated rather closely and established convincingly" as the work of Hilliard.[3]
The masters mentioned in The Art of Limning are
In the Art of Limning he cautioned against all but the minimal use of chiaroscuro modelling 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 ..."[29]
He emphasises the need to catch "the grace in countenance, in which the affections appear, which can neither be well used nor well-judged of but by the wiser sort". So the "wise drawer" should "watch" and "catch these lovely graces, witty smilings, and these stolen glances which suddenly like lightning pass and another countenance taketh place".[30] His normal technique (except for duplicates of royal images) was to paint the whole face in the presence of the sitter, probably in at least two sittings. He kept a number of prepared flesh-coloured blanks ready, in different shades, to save time on laying the "carnation" ground. He then painted the outlines of the features very faintly with a "pencil", actually a very fine pointed squirrel-hair brush, before filling these out by faint hatchings. He added to the techniques available, especially for clothes and jewels, often exploiting the tiny shadows cast by thick dots of paint to give a three-dimensionality to pearls and lace.[31] A few half-finished miniatures give a good idea of his working technique.[32] He probably made few drawings; certainly few have survived.
His style shows little development after the 1570s, apart from developing some technical refinements, except that many of his later repetitions of James I and his family are much weaker than his early works. James did not like sitting for his portrait and Hilliard probably had few sittings with him. From the 1590s on, his old pupil Isaac Oliver was a competitor, who was appointed as Limner to the new Queen Anne of Denmark in 1604, and then to Henry, Prince of Wales when he established his own household in 1610.[33] Oliver had travelled abroad and developed a more modern style than his master, and was certainly better at perspective drawing, though he could not match Hilliard in freshness and psychological penetration.
Gallery
Panel portraits
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Elizabeth I, 1576–78
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Sir Amias Paulet, 1576–78
Portrait miniatures
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Marguerite de Navarre, 1577
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Sir Francis Drake, 1581
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Sir Walter Raleigh, 1585
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Unknown youth, 1585,V&A
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V&A
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Christopher Hatton c. 1589
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Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke c. 1590
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Lettice Knollys, Countess of Leicester c. 1590–1595
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Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, daughter of James I, 1605–10
Elizabeth I
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Miniature ofElizabeth I, c. 1586–87, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.
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Miniature ofElizabeth I, 1572, National Portrait Gallery, London. Hilliard's earliest miniature of Elizabeth, executed when she was 38 years old.
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Elizabeth I playing the lute c. 1580
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c. 1587
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1595-1600
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1595-1600
Drawing and illumination
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Design for the obverse of a Great Seal of Ireland (never made) c. 1584. Hilliard drawings are rare.
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Probably one of the alternative designs Elizabeth requested for her newGreat Seal of Englandin 1584 - another version was chosen. V&A.
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Charter of Emmanuel College, Cambridge
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Drawing ofElizabeth Stuart, Electress Palatine, and her son Frederick Henry, probably for an engraving[34]
See also
- Artists of the Tudor court
- List of British artists
- Portraiture of Elizabeth I
- Portrait of Sir Francis Drake wearing the Drake Pendant, 1591
Notes
- ^ Waterhouse (1978), p. 38.
- ^ Cornforth, David. "Exeter Memories – Sheriffs of Exeter".
- ^ a b c Kinney (1983), pp.3–12
- ^ Strong (1975), 3.
- ^ a b c d e Williamson, George Charles (1911). Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 13 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 469. . In
- ^ a b Strong (1975), pp.3–4
- ^ Originally dated as 1550; date altered according to Edmond (1983)
- ^ a b c Strong (1987), pp. 79–83
- ^ a b Reynolds (1971), pp. 11–18
- ^ Strong (1975), p. 4
- ^ V&A website, accessed 12 September 2007
- ^ Strong (1975), p.5 – Paulet seems careful to avoid any suggestion of emigration in this despatch home.
- ^ Strong (1975), p. 6
- ^ Strong (1969), p.49
- ^ Batho, G. R., ed., Household Papers of Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland, Camden Society, (1962), 64–65.
- ^ Elizabeth Goldring, Nicholas Hilliard, Life of an Artist (London, 2019), pp. 127–8.
- ^ Strong (1983), p. 72
- ^ Strong (1975), pp. 4–7, 17
- ^ HMC, Manuscripts of the Marquis of Salisbury at Hatfield House, vol. 11 (1906), p. 306
- ^ "A radical new look at the greatest of Elizabethan artists | Apollo Magazine". Apollo Magazine. 29 May 2017. Retrieved 31 May 2017.
- ^ Strong (1983), p. 12
- ^ Strong (1975), p. 13
- ^ Strong (1983), pp. 9, 156–7, gives the identity of this painting as "almost certainly" the Earl of Essex
- ^ Strong (1975) pp. 14–18, quoting a revealing account of 1564 by Sir James Melville, also given in full in: Patricia Fumerton, 'Secret Arts: Elizabethan Miniatures and Sonnets', Representations, 15 (Summer, 1986), pp. 57–97, available on-line on JSTOR
- ^ Strong (1983), pp. 62 & 66
- ^ Elizabeth Goldring, Nicholas Hilliard (Yale, 2019), pp. 186–7: British Library Egerton MS 3052 f. 4
- ^ Strong (1983), p.150
- ^ Strong (1975), p. 17
- ^ Quotation from Hilliard's Art of Limming, c. 1600, in Strong (1975), p.24
- ^ Art of Limming, quoted in Strong (1975), p.23
- ^ VJ Murrell in Strong (1983), pp.15–16
- ^ Strong (1983), pp.28–9
- ^ V&A website (and following pages)[permanent dead link] accessed 12 September 2007
- ^ Strong (1983), p. 151
References
- Costa de Beauregard, Raphaelle (2000). Silent Elizabethans : The Language of Colour in the Miniatures of Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver. Montpellier: Charles Whitworth, Collection Astraea.
- Edmond, Mary (1983). Hilliard and Oliver: The Lives and Works of Two Great Miniaturists. London: Robert Hale.
- Goldring, Elizabeth (2019). Nicholas Hilliard, Life of an Artist. New Haven and London: Yale. ISBN 978-0-300-241426.
- Hearn, Karen, ed. (1995). Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England 1530–1630. New York: Rizzoli. ISBN 0-8478-1940-X.
- Kinney, Arthur F. (1983). Nicholas Hilliard's "Art of Limning". Northeastern University Press. ISBN 0-930350-31-6.
- Reynolds, Graham (1971). Nicholas Hilliard & Isaac Oliver. Her Majesty's Stationery Office.
- Strong, Roy (1969). English Icon: Elizabethan and Jacobean Portraiture. Routledge & Kegan Paul. ISBN 0-7100-6734-8.
- Strong, Roy (1975). Nicholas Hilliard. Michael Joseph. ISBN 0-7181-1301-2.
- Strong, Roy (1983). Artists of the Tudor Court: The Portrait Miniature Rediscovered 1520-1620. Victoria & Albert Museum. ISBN 0-905209-34-6.
- Strong, Roy (1987). Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I. Thames and Hudson. ISBN 0-500-25098-7.
- Waterhouse, Ellis (1978). Painting in Britain, 1530-1790 (4th ed.). Penguin Books. ISBN 9780140561012. (now Yale History of Art series)
External links
- The Heneage or Armada Jewel at the Victoria & Albert Museum site (also contains a miniature not shown)
- Second Great Seal of Elizabeth I, designed by Hilliard c. 1584
- "Dangers Averted" medal, c. 1569, attributed to Hilliard Archived 7 April 2008 at the Wayback Machine
- "Nicholas Hilliard's 'Young Man Among Roses'". Paintings & Drawings. Victoria and Albert Museum. Archived from the original on 9 September 2009. Retrieved 4 March 2011.
- "Nicholas Hilliard (1547–1619), Miniature painter". Paintings & Drawings. National Portrait Gallery, London.
- 12 artworks by or after Nicholas Hilliard at the Art UK site
- Power & Portraiture exhibition: painting at the court of Elizabeth I