When Henry VIII died in 1547, he left a religiously divided country to a young iconoclast who erased a large part of its visual culture. In a brief six years the government of Edward VI effectively whitewashed over England’s native heritage of sacred art, leaving a country already reliant on foreign painters for its royal portraits bereft of an artistic identity. Artistically speaking, Tudor England was the sick man of Europe — and the signs of recovery, when they first appeared, were tiny.
Nicholas Hilliard, born in the year of Henry VIII’s death, paradoxically owed his art education to his family’s Protestantism. The son of an Exeter goldsmith swept up in Wyatt’s Rebellion, an eight-year-old Hilliard spent four formative years, from 1555, among Marian exiles in northern Europe, where he made the discovery that ‘Germany breedeth or might breed more than a hundred’ painters for every one bred in England.
Returning home after the death of Mary I and winning an apprenticeship with a London goldsmith, he branched out into miniature painting, turning a sideline of the goldsmith’s trade into a speciality. By the age of 25 he was ensconced ‘in the open ally of a goodly garden’ painting a miniature of Queen Elizabeth I while engaging her majesty in a discussion of the art of shadows which, he flatteringly claimed in his treatise-cum-autobiography The Arte of Limning, ‘hath greatly bettered my Iugement’. The queen disliked shadows, which is why she chose the garden. The social-climbing Hilliard saw the art of conversation as crucial to success in his profession. He wished ‘that none should meddle with limning, but gentlemen alone, for that it is a kind of gentle painting… and tendeth not to common men’s use.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in