Elizabeth Goldring, Nicholas Hilliard: Life of an Artist. New Haven and London: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2019. 352pp. including 250 colour illustrations. ISBN: 9780300241426. £40 hardback.
It is almost impossible to imagine the Elizabethan court without thinking of an image that stems from the work of Nicholas Hilliard. He was the ‘Queen’s limner’, that is, the painter of portrait miniatures to Elizabeth I who devised the famous ‘mask of queenship’ and ‘mask of youth’ images that served as templates for depictions of Elizabeth in the last decades of her reign (176). The artist’s patrons included figures such as Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Ralegh, Mary Queen of Scots and Catherine de Medici, while John Donne and (perhaps) Shakespeare praised his works. Given Hilliard’s popularity in elite circles, it is tempting to assume that he was rather like his portrait miniatures: carefully contained and gloriously, elegantly composed. Elizabeth Goldring’s richly-illustrated biography shows that Hilliard was quite the opposite: a chaotic, hugely ambitious and at times unscrupulous man who lead a dramatic and varied life at the heart of early modern European history. This meticulously-documented account of Hilliard and his world thus has broad appeal to scholars across early modern studies.
Published to coincide with the quartercentenary of Hilliard’s death, Goldring’s study is the first full-length biography of the artist to re-evaluate his life in light of scholarly advances in art history and early modern studies in the twenty-first century. Across eight focused chapters Goldring covers Hilliard’s early life in Exeter and his time as a Marian exile on the continent; his rise to fame as the leading artist of the Elizabethan court and his difficult final years in the wake of the death of his major patron, Robert Cecil, in 1612. The breadth and range of this biography is a significant part of its contribution. Since the late twentieth century there has been an outpouring of research on Tudor portraiture, but scholarship in this area has often focused narrowly on what the paintings tell us about the relationship between culture and power. In particular, Hilliard’s images of Elizabeth and her courtiers have come to stand – alongside Holbein’s portraits of the Henrician court – as emblems of elite self-fashioning of the sort described in new-historicist accounts of the period. Goldring invites us to see well beyond these parameters in our understanding of Hilliard’s life and work, and the culture to which he contributed so much.
Goldring delights in the variety of evidence about Hilliard available to her at this juncture in scholarly history. The author exploits the latest technological developments in art-historical research, which, for example, permit her to speak with authority on Hilliard and his workshop’s association with the ‘Pelican’ and ‘Phoenix’ portraits of Elizabeth (109). Elsewhere, the author revels in extensive evidence that Hilliard’s financial affairs were ‘precarious and ill-managed’, and that he ‘lived large’, investing heavily in his ‘self-presentation as a gentleman’ (201-3). This evidence illuminates the networks of patronage and underhand dealings that underpinned Hilliard’s work. For example, the painter frequently called on patrons including Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, Cecil and Elizabeth herself to bail him out. The picture that emerges of Hilliard here is unflattering, and Goldring has no qualms in acknowledging this. She admits, for example, that Hilliard ‘comes across as a con man’ in evidence relating to his legal and financial disputes (203). In an incident in 1585 Hilliard appears almost cartoonishly disreputable, effectively stealing money from an orphan’s fund administered by his father in law, Robert Brandon. Such examples create the impression that Hilliard’s glittering visual works were mired in a murky world of financial escapades. For example, in pursuit of financial gain Hilliard seems to have defied a royal patent of 1584 which restricted him to the production of limned portraits (paintings in ‘little’ rather than larger-scale paintings ‘in great’). Goldring speculates that Hilliard earned ‘new money for old rope’ by turning his ‘painted portraits in great of Elizabeth off into prints for the mass market’ (196). Hilliard’s paintings deified Elizabeth, but it appears possible that his approach to the sale of her image may have actively disrespected royal authority.
This account of Hilliard’s chaotic and ruthless professional life is so compelling in part because Goldring is attentive to the artist’s involvement in early modern civic culture. The opening chapter constructs a picture of Hilliard’s earliest years in Exeter, where he was born – probably in 1547 – the eldest son in a goldsmithing family. Hilliard trained first as an apprentice goldsmith rather than as a painter, a trade with a significantly lower status at the time (20). The delineation of this civic context is important for understanding Hilliard’s cultural significance, as the painter aimed to raise the profile of painting in early modern England (this is, for example, one of the concerns – alongside self-promotion – of his treatise, The Art of Limning, written between 1598-1603, but unpublished in Hilliard’s lifetime). In addition, the guilds of Exeter and London frequently play crucial roles in Hilliard’s career. For example, Goldring points out that Hilliard probably went to London in the 1560s not to seek fame and fortune as a painter, but because of instability in the Exeter guild and a coincidental set of circumstances arising from the sale of a fake gold chain. Later, Hilliard lived and worked in premises on Gutter Lane, London that he rented from the Goldsmith’s Company. Here again Hilliard’s messy financial dealings surface: throughout the 1590s he used his reputation and connections as the ‘Queens Limner’ to fend off the Company’s annual attempts to extract the ‘rent of £3’ that Hilliard perennially owed on the property (237-8).
The disordered nature of Hilliard’s financial affairs matches the turbulence of the religious and political events that he witnessed, and Goldring’s account of the painter’s early years as a Marian exile are some of the most fascinating in the book. Although it has long been known that Hilliard travelled to the continent with John Bodley in the 1550s, this biography brings sharply to light Hilliard’s deep involvement with Reformation culture and its formative influence on his development as a painter. For example, Goldring is the first biographer to point out the full significance of Hilliard’s time in Wesel, Germany, during 1555-1556. Katherine Bertie, the Duchess of Suffolk, was one of the main figures in the Marian exile community in this ‘sleepy city on the lower Rhine’, and Goldring proposes that it is highly likely that Bertie would have carried with her Holbein’s beautiful, moving portrait miniatures of her young sons, both of whom had died of the sweating sickness in 1551 (45). This possibility allows Goldring to speculate that it may have been with the sight of these paintings in Wesel that Hilliard had ‘his first direct experience of portrait miniatures’ and perhaps his first experience of any painting by Holbein (47). A further significant contribution is Goldring’s emphasis on the ‘scholarly riches’ that the artist encountered while living with the Bodleys in Geneva (54). Again, critics and biographers have noted this stage of Hilliard’s life in the past but Goldring pursues the significance of the painter’s experiences in Geneva – and particularly his education – with a fine attention to detail. Hilliard was a member of John Knox’s congregation and almost certainly attended Calvin’s lectures at the chapel adjacent to the Cathédrale de St-Pierre, known as the ‘Auditoire de Calvin’. Most significantly, Hilliard had ‘a front-row seat’ for the production of the Geneva Bible, which Bodley financed with William Williams, and which was the result of ‘a collaborative effort by several of the leading lights in Knox’s congregation’ (55-6). Goldring pays particular attention to the production of the woodcuts that illustrated the Geneva Bible and conform to Calvinist views on the instructional purpose of illustration. This context is as formative for Hilliard, the author considers, as the experience of watching goldsmiths at work in his father’s shop.
What emerges from Goldring’s account of Hilliard’s time in Geneva (and also her discussion of his childhood in Exeter’s minority Protestant community) is a sense of the great complexity of the relation between faith and visual culture in this period. It used to be assumed that early modern English visual artists were inferior to their continental peers because the Reformation impoverished English visual culture. Art historians have contested this view convincingly, although there is some truth in it: as Goldring notes, when ‘exchanging portraits with other queens’, including Catherine de Medici, Elizabeth seems to have been ‘embarrassed’ by ‘the disparity in sophistication of the images she was sending and those she was receiving’ (89). Overall, however, Goldring’s discussion of Hilliard’s early religious life shows that Protestantism is not anti-visual-art, but rather that the European Reformation produces the most famous English painter of the Elizabethan and early Jacobean eras. This complex overlap between religion and art echoes in the tastes and experiences of Hilliard’s well-known acquaintances, most famously Sir Philip Sidney, the zealous Protestant who sat for Veronese and with whom Hilliard discussed ‘the role of perspective and proportion’ in painting (126).
The lavish illustration of this book adds to the impression that Hilliard’s visual world was rich and diverse. Alongside the portrait miniatures Goldring includes a fascinating range of images: Konrad Witz’s Miraculous Draught of the Fishes (c. 1444), showing Geneva and Lac Léman, combines with illustrations from the Geneva Bible, Lucas de Heere’s depictions of citizen women in early modern London and the title page of Sermons of Master Iohn Calvin, vpon the Booke of Iob (1574), for which Hilliard possibly provided the design for the woodcut title border. This range of illustration provides an excellent visual context for the miniatures, some of which are reproduced alongside stunning, magnified close-ups of Hilliard’s work. A magnification of Henri III’s bejewelled hat from a miniature of 1576–8 is a good example: Goldring rightly comments that ‘this miniature – even when greatly magnified – suffers no diminution of effect’ (148).
Goldring’s accounts of these images are lucid, entertaining and accessible to non-art-historians. Of an ‘exceptionally flattering’ portrait of François, duc d’ Anjou, for example, she observes that Hilliard boldly makes Anjou’s face – famously scarred by smallpox – the ‘vanishing point’ for the painting, gives ‘no hint of …distorted physiognomy’, and shows Anjou’s ‘downy beard and moustache … almost as an extension of his ruff’ (148). This commentary on the paintings makes clear that a capacity for flattery was central to Hilliard’s success. In the 1590s, for example, Hilliard’s rival and former pupil Isaac Oliver painted a far-too-accurate portrait of Elizabeth and lost the opportunity to displace Hilliard as leading painter of the Queen’s image (212). Hilliard stepped in and produced the ‘mask of youth’ template that was so fundamental to the construction of Elizabeth as Virgin Queen by Spenser and others in the 1590s. Hilliard continued this flattering approach in the late stages of his career, as in an arresting portrait miniature of 1613 of the young prince Charles (later Charles I), that glosses over the prince’s timidity and sickliness to present ‘an alert little boy with an erect carriage and sparkling blue eyes’ (263).
As noted, Goldring is quick to criticise Hilliard’s conduct and never idolises him or indulges in sentiment, but her final chapter evokes sympathy for her subject. Hilliard worked successfully in the early Stuart years: Charles may have sat for him up to eight times, and, unlike Elizabeth, James I paid the artist ‘promptly and handsomely’ for his services (263; 273). The painter’s financial circumstances remained troubled, however, and became particularly severe following Cecil’s death and possibly also that of Hilliard’s wife, Alice, who may have died in 1611 (275). As the book closes, Goldring laments that Hilliard did not leave a legacy in the sense of an artistic dynasty: his son Laurence and grandson Brandon were both ‘reluctant’ limners (278). Hilliard’s enormous talent, and ‘the spirit of an age’ may have ‘died with him’, but Goldring’s book triumphantly revives the artist’s great importance for early modern English culture (278).
Chloe Porter
University of Sussex
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