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Nicholas Hilliard’s First Encounter with Elizabeth I: Identifying the Moment
from PMC Notes
When attempting to make sense of events that occurred more than 400 years ago, often there are significant gaps in the documentary record, so that basic questions such as “who”, “what”, “when”, “where”, “why”, and “how” cannot be answered. This applies with particular force when the subject is painting in Tudor England, for surviving references to art and artists tend to be patchy and imprecise. Nicholas Hilliard’s recollection, in his Arte of Limning, of the first time he portrayed Elizabeth I from the life offers a case in point—as well as an illustration of the ways in which archival detective work, coupled with a bit of luck, can make it possible to draw connections previously unseen.
Nicholas Hilliard, Elizabeth I, 1572. Watercolour on vellum, 51 x 48 mm. (National Portrait Gallery, London)
Hilliard’s account of “when first I came in her highnes presence to drawe” constitutes the only known firsthand description of the Virgin Queen sitting for her portrait and discussing her requirements: namely, her desire to avoid “shadowing”, to which end she “chosse her place to sit … in the open ally of a goodly garden, where no tree was neere”. Frustratingly, however, Hilliard’s narrative raises almost as many questions as it answers. When and where did this outdoor encounter, which was to prove formative for both artist and sitter, occur? And how and why did this most prestigious of commissions come about? In the main, Hilliard’s biographers have skated over such questions—though, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, it has often been assumed that the sitting described in The Arte of Limning must have occurred in 1572, the date of Hilliard’s earliest surviving miniature of Elizabeth.
In the course of researching my new biography, Nicholas Hilliard: Life of an Artist, I gradually came to realise that much of what we thought we knew—and, indeed, could know—about this most celebrated of Elizabethan portraitists is ripe for re-evaluation. In the case of the occasion when Hilliard first “came in her highnes presence to drawe”, clues from disparate documents—including acts of the Privy Council, accounts of the wardens of the Goldsmiths’ Company, and correspondence of the French ambassador to England—enabled me not only to identify the political and cultural contexts out of which Hilliard’s first miniature of Elizabeth arose but also to pinpoint the probable date and location of the sitting. Assembling the pieces of this particular puzzle was a slow, accretive, and forensic process— though no less thrilling for that. The full story may be followed in my book. But the bare bones are as follows.
Having become a freeman of the Goldsmiths’ Company in the previous year, by 1570, Hilliard counted Elizabeth’s powerful favourite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, as his patron. It was a connection facilitated, in all probability, by the goldsmith Robert Brandon, Hilliard’s former master (and future father-in-law), who supplied plate to Leicester and also acted as the earl’s banker and moneylender. In spring 1571, Leicester, who regularly exchanged art with Catherine de Medici, sent the French Queen Mother a painting of himself “en petit volume”, a miniature which must have been by Hilliard, whom Leicester had just begun to patronize. Catherine, who long had bemoaned the poor quality of English
Nicholas Hilliard, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, c. 1571-74. Watercolour on vellum, d. 44 mm. (V&A, London)
painting and portraiture, expressed uncharacteristic delight on receipt of this new image. She reciprocated by sending Leicester two drawings by François Clouet of her son, the future Henri III, whom she was at the time scheming to marry off to Elizabeth. Catherine also requested, in a letter dated 3 July 1571, that Leicester procure for her a new portrait of Elizabeth straight away (“bientost”), just like the one “en petit volume” she recently had received of him—presumably, so that she might show it to Henri.
Events moved swiftly. The French ambassador seems to have delivered Catherine’s letter to Leicester shortly before 10 July 1571. Not long after, on 22 July 1571, the requested miniature of Elizabeth was dispatched to France. The Elizabethan court often spent the period from May to September on farflung progresses through the English countryside. But Elizabeth (and Leicester)
Nicholas Hilliard, Self-Portrait, 1577. Watercolour on vellum, d. 41 mm. (V&A, London)
