Style
He was the author of an important treatise on miniature painting, now called The Art of Limning (c. 1600), preserved in the Bodleian Library. Although it was once believed that the author of that treatise was John de Critz, Serjeant Painter to James I, from instructions by Hilliard for the benefit of one of his pupils, perhaps Isaac Oliver, more recent scholarship holds that the Art "can be dated rather closely and established convincingly" as the work of Hilliard.
The masters mentioned in The Art of Limning are Hans Holbein the Younger, Henry VIII's court painter, and Albrecht Dürer, who he probably only knew from his prints. Both were dead by the time of Hilliard's birth, and in many respects he is more conservative even than Holbein. He also 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 Hilliard's art is a world away from that of the early-Baroque Italian artists of his time, or his close contemporary El Greco (1541–1614).
In the Art of Limning he cautioned against all but the minimal use of chiaroscuro modelling that we see in his works, reflecting the views of his patron Elizabeth: "seeing that best to show oneself needeth no shadow of place but rather the open light ... Her Majesty .. chose her place to sit for that purpose in the open alley of a goodly garden, where no tree was near, nor any shadow at all ..."
He 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". So the "wise drawer" should "watch" and "catch these lovely graces, witty smilings, and these stolen glances which suddenly like lightning pass and another countenance taketh place". His normal technique (except for duplicates of royal images) was to paint the whole face in the presence of the sitter, probably in at least two sittings. He kept a number of prepared flesh-coloured blanks ready, in different shades, to save time on laying the "carnation" ground. He 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. He 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. A few half-finished miniatures give a good idea of his working technique. He probably made few drawings; certainly few have survived.
His style shows little development after the 1570s, apart from developing some technical refinements, except that many of his later repetitions of James I and his family are much weaker than his early works. James did not like sitting for his portrait and Hilliard probably had few sittings with him. From the 1590s on his old pupil Isaac Oliver was a competitor, who was appointed as Limner to the new Queen Anne of Denmark in 1604, and then to Henry, Prince of Wales when he established his own household in 1610. Oliver had travelled abroad and developed a more modern style than his master, and was certainly better at perspective drawing, though he could not match Hilliard in freshness and psychological penetration.
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