HILLIARD, Nicholas

Queen Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, as she fashioned herself, controlled her never aging image. Elizabeth is an icon here. The body’s volume is suppressed. Elizabeth’s head and red hair are like gems placed into a sumptuous setting. Her laced collar and her jewel and pearl-encrusted dress compete for the viewers. She bears the red Tudor rose in her right hand. She also sports a jewelled Tudor rose on her chest just above a phoenix. This mythical desert-bird was a symbol of immortality and regeneration, since it would renew itself by building a funeral pyre and then rise again from its ashes. Here the phoenix functions as a symbol for her reign.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 18 minutes):

George Frideric Handel: Fireworks Music

Nicholas Hilliard, a goldsmith and miniaturist, is one of the lesser known yet highly important artists of early Baroque. His unique achievement lies in his creation of a type of courtly portraiture unparalleled in European painting at the time. By his own admission, he was influenced by Hans Holbein, that peerless master of the portrait miniature, for whom Hilliard expressed his unreserved admiration in his writings.

However, Hilliard’s sophisticated and finely executed miniatures have little in common with the work of his German forerunner, apart from their mastery of fine technique and certain aesthetic principles such as the avoidance of chiaroscuro and strong modelling. These are features of an absolutely aristocratic stance in keeping with the attitudes displayed by the very people he painted.

Hilliard’s portrait of George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, from c. 1590, is a full-figure portrait, which is quite rare, and it is one of this artist’s most complex works. This successful naval leader was a favourite of Elizabeth I and his feathered hat also bears the Queen’s glove as a mark of distinction which adds the finishing touch to his courtly apparel in the guise of a knight.

Formerly the miniature was thought to be a portrait of Queen Elizabeth I attributed to the school of Hilliard, now it is considered as an authentic miniature by Nicholas Hilliard, painted with much refinement on the small scale he increasingly used throughout the 1590s. The identification of Elizabeth I is inadmissible, and there is as yet no clue to the sitter’s name.

Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) reigned 1558-1603. This remarkable picture is the earliest known miniature of the queen, painted when she was 38 years old.

This portrait, called the Hardwick Portrait, was executed by the workshop of Hilliard. It concurs with others of the ‘Armada’ type, painted after 1588, in which the Queen is characterised by a rigid and hieratic expression and depicted almost as an impersonal image. It is thought that it was Bess of Hardwick (by then Countess of Shrewsbury), who masterminded the design of the embroidery on the Queen’s dress, and possibly worked on it herself, intending it to be a spectacular New Year’s Day gift to the Queen. It is typical of the extravagant and sometimes bizarre late-Elizabethan style of embroidery which mixed together all manner of motifs taken from the natural world.

This portrait of the Queen was brought from London to Hardwick in 1599.

The miniature portrait represents a young man, head and shoulders, turned slightly to right and looking to front; the sitter is wearing a black cap and a ruff. Inscriptions in gold are on either side of the portrait on a blue background. The painting is set in a gold circular frame with raised concentric circles.

This portrait is perhaps the most famous of English miniatures. It epitomises the romantic Elizabethan age and is a masterpiece of miniature paintings by its greatest exponent, Nicholas Hilliard. It shows a young man, full length, oval, leaning against a tree among roses. Inscribed above the head is a Latin motto taken from Lucan’s De Bello Civili: ‘Dat / poenas laudata fides’ (‘a praised faith’). The young man is possibly Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex.