28 Facts About Nicholas Hilliard

Nicholas Hilliard mostly painted small oval miniatures, but some larger cabinet miniatures, up to about 10 inches tall, and at least two famous half-length panel portraits of Elizabeth.

Nicholas Hilliard enjoyed continuing success as an artist, and continuing financial troubles, for forty-five years.

Nicholas Hilliard was the son of Richard Hilliard of Exeter, Devon, spelt Hellyer, a goldsmith who became a staunch Protestant and was Sheriff of Exeter in 1568, by his marriage to Laurence, daughter of John Wall, a City of London goldsmith.

Nicholas Hilliard was one of four boys: two others became goldsmiths, and one a clergyman.

Nicholas Hilliard appears to have been attached at a young age to the household of the leading Exeter Protestant John Bodley, the father of Thomas Bodley who founded the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

Thomas Bodley, two years older, continued an intensive classical education under leading scholars in Geneva, but it is not clear to what extent Nicholas Hilliard was given similar studies.

Nicholas Hilliard painted a portrait of himself at the age of 13 in 1560 and is said to have executed one of Mary, Queen of Scots, when he was eighteen years old.

Nicholas Hilliard was the daughter of Simon Bening, the last great master of the Flemish manuscript illumination tradition, and became court painter to Henry VIII after Holbein's death.

Nicholas Hilliard set up a workshop with his younger brother John; another brother was a goldsmith, and the youngest a clergyman.

Nicholas Hilliard emerged from his apprenticeship at a time when a new royal portrait painter was "desperately needed".

Francis Bacon was attached to the embassy, and Nicholas Hilliard did a miniature of him in Paris.

Nicholas Hilliard appears in the papers of the duc d'Alencon, a suitor of Queen Elizabeth, under the name of "Nicholas Belliart, peintre anglois", in 1577, receiving a stipend of 200 livres.

The miniature of Madame de Sourdis, certainly the work of Nicholas Hilliard, is dated 1577, in which year she was a maid of honour at the French court; and other portraits which are his work are believed to represent Gabrielle d'Estrees, la princesse de Conde, and Madame de Montgomery.

Around the year 1574 Nicholas Hilliard invested in a gold mine in Scotland with Cornelius de Vos and lost money.

Nicholas Hilliard explained that he had trained apprentices who now competed with him in the private painting market.

Nicholas Hilliard asked that Cecil employ his son as a clerk, because he could not keep him in his own trade.

Nicholas Hilliard had moved to an unknown address in the parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields, out of the city and nearer the Court.

Nicholas Hilliard continued to work as a goldsmith, and produced some spectacular "picture boxes" or jewelled lockets for miniatures, worn round the neck, such as the Lyte Jewel in the British Museum, which, typically, was given by James I to a courtier, Thomas Lyte, in 1610.

Nicholas Hilliard seems to have designed woodcut title-page frames and borders for books, some of which bear his initials.

The esteem of his contemporaries for Nicholas Hilliard is testified to by John Donne, who in a poem called The Storm praises the work of this artist.

Nicholas Hilliard learned from French art, including their chalk drawings, and refers to the artist and theoretical writer Gian Paolo Lomazzo.

English art was distinctly provincial, and Nicholas Hilliard's art is a world away from that of the early-Baroque Italian artists of his time, or his close contemporary El Greco.

Nicholas Hilliard emphasises the need to catch "the grace in countenance, in which the affections appear, which can neither be well used nor well-judged of but by the wiser sort".

Nicholas Hilliard kept a number of prepared flesh-coloured blanks ready, in different shades, to save time on laying the "carnation" ground.

Nicholas Hilliard then painted the outlines of the features very faintly with a "pencil", actually a very fine pointed squirrel-hair brush, before filling these out by faint hatchings.

Nicholas Hilliard added to the techniques available, especially for clothes and jewels, often exploiting the tiny shadows cast by thick dots of paint to give a three-dimensionality to pearls and lace.

Nicholas Hilliard probably made few drawings; certainly few have survived.

James did not like sitting for his portrait and Nicholas Hilliard probably had few sittings with him.