Small wonders from Elizabethan giants

It feels an appropriate moment to be looking again at what have often been seen as the first truly great English paintings

CHIEF ART CRITIC

Exhibition

Miniatures by Hilliard & Oliver

National Portrait Gallery

★★★★★

We’ve modified our view of the Elizabethan era over the past couple of decades. The wide-eyed, Golden Age view of late Tudor England, with its beautiful young Queen and dazzling array of creative talent – the Swinging Sixties with ruffs, if you like – has given way to a more sobering perspective. Thanks to a spate of revisionist histories and fictions, we’d be forgiven for coming to think of the England of Good Queen Bess as a ruthless police state presided over by a white-faced despot, in which dissidents were burnt at the drop of a hat. But if there’s any art form likely to restore our faith in the romantic glamour of this pivotal period, it’s the exquisite portrait miniatures of Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver, with their spectacularly dressed courtiers, cool-eyed gentlewomen and steely explorers.

Often little bigger than a 10p piece, these minutely detailed images weren’t intended to be displayed on walls but to be worn on the body as brooches, lockets and badges, or kept in chests and drawers to be pored over in private. You could hardly get a more intimate sense of the people of that now distant time.

But are these images quite what they appear?

If Hilliard and Oliver are hardly undiscovered territory, this exhibition featuring 95 prime examples of their work is the first such showing in more than 35 years. With our cultural identity under scrutiny in every direction, it feels an appropriate moment to be looking again at what have often been seen as the first truly great English paintings.

The exhibition sets out its territory in its opening display with superb self-portraits by its two protagonists. Hilliard, an Exeter goldsmith’s son and the long-established master in this field, appears as a beady-eyed, fashionably dressed 30-year-old, already an influential figure at court, with tousled curls and a determined set to the mouth beneath his curling moustache. Shown in equally beautiful miniatures alongside, his smooth-faced wife wears an expression of quiet determination, while his father looks a formidable curmudgeon. There’s a freshness and immediacy to these portraits of the sort of relatively modest people who hadn’t previously been portrayed in art – the emergent middle class – while the flat blue backgrounds in expensive ultramarine, and golden mottos encircling the rims, seem to link them back to the medieval world of heraldry and magic.

Shown beside them, the selfportrait by Oliver, Hilliard’s pupil and later rival, is slightly smaller. But it shows more of the figure, with the artist’s hand on his hip with an I-can-do-anything swagger. While both artists had strong European connections, Oliver, born into a French Huguenot family in London, seems to have seen himself from the outset as a more modern, cosmopolitan artist. From here on, the show is framed as a kind of duel between two giants of the miniature.

However, rather than being just very good portraits, these miniatures (such as Hilliard’s remarkably lifelike Portrait of a Man, 1572) were symbolic artefacts that often served political purposes. Hilliard, for example, was sent to France in 1576 in a quasidiplomatic capacity to paint the Duke of Anjou, a prospective suitor for Elizabeth. While that painting hasn’t survived, we’re shown a recently discovered and sumptuously realistic portrait of the foxy-looking French king Henry III, with fuller modelling to the features than in Hilliard’s earlier works, apparently influenced by French miniaturists such as François Clouet, whose portrait of the king’s mother, Catherine de’ Medici, is shown alongside.

Henry’s oval portrait is only 5cm long – and many are far smaller. Yet if the prospect of peering at these tiny works seems daunting, once you get absorbed in the personality and detail, you barely notice the size. Indeed, as soon as the scale expands, this sense of magical concentration is lost. Two life-size portraits by Hilliard of Sir Amias Paulet and Queen Elizabeth are pedestrian, and very much what you’d expect of a time when England was seen as an artistic backwater.

While Hilliard became the Queen’s favourite portraitist, the seven images of Elizabeth presented here – including a deep-relief gold medallion, a design for the Queen’s Great Seal of Ireland and a miniature of the young Queen with her hair hanging loose – are oddly characterless as portraits, as though Hilliard shrank from subjecting the monarch to the same sharp scrutiny as his humbler subjects. Oliver, on the other hand, is said to have blotted his copybook by presenting a brutally frank likeness on what proved his first and last invitation to paint the Queen – but in fact, the incisive rendering of the Queen’s weary features in the unfinished painting presented here gives a far stronger sense of Elizabeth’s appearance and personality than any painting I’ve seen.

Oliver, in general, seems to have been a more sympathetic painter of women: there’s a warmth and atmospheric depth to works such as his dark-eyed Unknown Woman Wearing a Hat (1590-95) that makes Hilliard’s women feel a bit cold and distant. But, anyway, it’s the men, not the women, who are sex symbols in this exhibition.

Despite his beard, Hilliard’s brighteyed Sir Walter Raleigh is prettier than any of the girls here, while the subject of his Unknown Young Man Against a Background of Flames proclaims his passion not through an image of his beloved, but of himself.

The dreamy looking figure in Hilliard’s surreal Unknown Man Clasping a Hand from a Cloud grasps a white hand reaching into the painting from above, a symbolic representation of homosexual love, the exhibition speculates – although, while “passionate friendship between men was encouraged”, we are told, “homosexual acts were punishable by death”.

Images of handsome young bucks sprawled like well-dressed pin-ups in woodland glades, adopting archetypal roles such as the melancholy philosopher or the chivalric knight, confirm the impression of a society dominated by a powerful woman, where well-born young men channelled their sexuality not only through their clothing and manners, but through their intellectual pursuits.

The show climaxes with two of the most famous of all Elizabethan miniatures, both showing lovelorn young males. Hilliard’s Young Man Among Roses, with its white blooms and thorny fronds seeming to grow all over its white-stockinged protagonist, is popularly believed to represent Elizabeth’s long-term favourite – for which read lover – the Earl of Essex. And, as always in high-stakes Tudor relationships, there’s a political dimension to his dreamy melancholy: the thorny rose represents the pain of love and the dangers of losing one’s influence at court, leading conceivably to punishment, even death.

If Hilliard’s Essex – assuming that’s who it is – is just a sweetly smiling cipher, the subject of Oliver’s Young Man Seated under a Tree, with his fashionable top hat and wistful brown eyes, feels like a fully realised individual: the sort of self-absorbed perpetual student you might encounter wandering Oxford or Cambridge even today. Hilliard seems stuck in a world of essentially medieval symbolism, while Oliver looks to the psychological era. Yet forced to make a choice, I’d still plump for Hilliard’s. Beyond the minutiae of its allegorical meanings, it’s such a vibrant, evergreen embodiment of the young male principle: the English dandy in his prime.

Oliver may have been a more sophisticated artist, but Hilliard’s images have an emblematic force that still resonates powerfully today. He’s still, to my mind, the boss of the English miniature.