Nicholas Hilliard: Life of an Artist by Elizabeth Goldring - review

The knowing glances of wealthy sitters in meticulous tiny portraits painted by Nicholas Hilliard between 1571 and about 1618 are mesmerising, leaping 400 years like a lover’s dart. Set in precious mounts, these roughly 5cm tall watercolours on vellum or re-used playing cards were called “pictures in little” — miniatures today.

Their like had never been seen: the clear skin, sparkling eyes enlivened with white highlights; glistening curls; translucent “jewels” of coloured resin on burnished silver; ruffs of opaque white in reticulated three-dimensional layers. And they turned a youth from Exeter trained for seven years as a goldsmith into the foremost portrait painter in England.

Born in 1547, Hilliard became Queen Elizabeth I’s personal painter for 32 years. His miniatures raised the perception of painters from jobbing jacks-of-all-trades to potential courtiers, and the reputation of English portrait artists from wooden to wondrous.

Elizabeth Goldring’s engrossing, thickly illustrated biography shows that it was a rags-to-riches-and-back-again story. She gives a detailed account of Hilliard’s four-year sojourn in Europe, where he acquired French and a world-view, then of his London training, evoking the bustling streets where his father apprenticed him to royal goldsmith Robert Brandon, who provided plate for Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.

The apprentice Hilliard darted between richly appointed houses, the Jewel House and the Mint. Goldring explains that goldsmiths acted as bankers, and the ambitious lad must have soaked it all up. She argues that in 1571 the Earl of Leicester probably showed Hilliard’s little portrait of himself, destined for Catherine de’ Medici, to Elizabeth I. Hilliard soon became Elizabeth’s court “limner” (a decorative painter — a term previously used for manuscript illuminators), with a £40 stipend, plus £3 per miniature. He and his later Gutter Lane workshop also produced large oil paintings and designed royal seals, medals and coins. King James I granted him the same terms.

Despite exhaustive research the author cannot definitively explain how, in 1571, just two years after his apprenticeship ended, Hilliard was skilled enough to paint a (now lost) miniature of Elizabeth, which Leicester sent to France and which essentially began his astounding career.

In the painter’s important treatiseThe Arte of Limning (c1603), Hilliard claimed his was a “divine gift”, “self-taught” (having studied Albrecht Dürer’s technique). Goldring rejects this “out of hand”, yet her findings cannot disprove a term which, after all, allows interpretative leeway. Given the sure-footedness of Hilliard’s draughting and painting, I’m keeping an open mind. Soon called “beloved” by the queen, Hilliard’s portable portraits formed the world’s impression of her during her reign and beyond, and made him Elizabethan England’s supreme painter. His bold 1577 self-portrait in courtly dress sets the tone.

As well as numerous images of Elizabeth, he painted her court: Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, romantic Essex. And the French Valois court, where he was sent to make a likeness of Elizabeth’s pock-marked potential husband, the Duc d’Anjou. He also painted Anjou’s better-looking brother, Henri III.

Using delicate squirrel brushes mounted in tiny quills on wooden sticks, Hilliard made hair-thin strokes and dots, building exquisitely drawn and animated portraits that almost magically reveal character. His 1610-11 portrait of James I in the so-called Lyte Jewel portrays nervous anxiety and introspection in a dazzling display of virtuosity. Yet, as “old Hilliard”, he saw tastes turning towards his former pupil Isaac Oliver’s Italianate qualities and the greater use of shadowing to model.

Goldring leaves no doubt about the breadth and importance of Hilliard’s achievement and his ability to convey psychological depth. But alas that genius does not guarantee fortune. This superb book vividly conjures a costly dresser and spendthrift, terrible with money, litigious, and sometimes slippery with creditors. He made a disastrous early investments in gold mining, demolishing a £100 gift from Elizabeth I, and never quite clawed his advantage back. Patrons bailed him out of debt more than once, and his penultimate year was spent in Ludgate jail for debt. What humiliation for one who painted everyone who counted.

Nicholas Hilliard: Life of an Artist by Elizabeth Goldring (Yale University Press, £40)