Art: Limner to the Queen

The Elizabethan age, big with luxury, vanity, conquest and high emprise, also produced the English miniature. It was the Century of the Uncommon Man. The art of the miniaturist, wrote Miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard in 1600, is “a thing apart from all other painting or drawing, and tendeth not to common men’s use . . . and is for the service of noble persons, very meet in small volumes in private manner for them to have portraits and pictures of themselves, their peers and any other.”

Nicholas Hilliard was the first, and greatest, of English miniaturists. Last week, 400 years after his birth, 101 Hilliard miniatures were on display in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.

Playing-Card Faces. Usually designed to be set in lockets and viewed cupped in the hand, the miniatures showed up surprisingly well under the cold glass of the museum’s showcases. Most were only two inches in their largest dimension, often pasted on the back of cut-down playing cards, but in their small compass Hilliard had captured much of the sensuous exuberance of the age of Drake, Spenser and Sidney. One was a self-portrait, at 30, fine-featured and candid-eyed, painted against Hilliard’s favorite indigo-blue background. The biggest (see cut) was a 10⅛-inch painting of the buccaneering 3rd Earl of Cumberland. Besides portraits of courtiers, there were miniatures of a lovesick youth leaning against a tree, entangled in roses; a grave young man fingering a locket against a background of flames. Their flesh tones had faded, but they still shone with immaculate drawing, clean, jewel-like color, and a fine use of lace and ornament to produce a sharp, flat pattern.

Limning, as the Elizabethans called it, was done with opaque watercolor on vellum using fine brushes called pencils. In his Art of Limning, Hilliard directed: “The first and chiefest precept which I give is cleanliness, and therefore fittest for gentlemen, that the practicer of limning be precisely pure and cleanly in all his doings . . . take heed of the dandruff of the head shedding from the hair, and of speaking over your work for sparkling, for the least sparkling of spittle will never be helped if it light in the face or any part of the naked.”

In Holbein’s Steps. The son of a Devonshire goldsmith, Hilliard was trained as a jeweler, started painting miniatures at 13. He carefully studied the work of Holbein, who had done several miniatures during his stay in England a few years earlier. Before he was 25, Hilliard’s work was in demand at court. Gay and handsome, Hilliard enjoyed himself. Of the artist’s life at court, he noted: “It behooveth that he be in heart wise, as it will hardly fail that he shall be amorous.” He was appointed limner and goldsmith to Queen Elizabeth (“to my credit and great comfort”) and later to James I.

As his fame grew, Hilliard took on many students, among them a Huguenot émigré, Isaac Oliver, who in later years displaced him in court favor. Oliver, whose miniatures were also on display last week, employed more subdued colors and stronger modeling in his faces. Hilliard disapproved: “A picture a little shadowed may be borne withal for the rounding of it, but so greatly smutted or darkened as some use disgrace it, and is like truth ill told.” In his pictures of the Queen, Hilliard dutifully suppressed the shadows of Elizabeth’s aging face, contented himself with pink flesh tints, the conventional tapering Elizabethan features, and recording with a jeweler’s delight the colors of emerald, sapphire, ruby and topaz.

When Hilliard died in 1619, he was relatively poor; he had lived too much of the Elizabethan high life. Good artists, he wrote, “are commonly no misers, but liberal above their little degree . . . they are much given to practices, to find out new skills . . . to travel, and to confer with wise men, to fare meetly well and serve their fantasies.”