Vol. 161 / No. 1391
Vol. 161 / No. 1391
There are times when
current political debates seem to entwine in the most complex ways with art
history. It is not surprising that the United Kingdom’s decision in 2016 to
leave the European Union is one example, since it raises fundamental issues of
national identity. Brexit’s shadow falls in surprising places, few less likely
perhaps than over an artist who said that the depiction of shadows had no part
in his work, Nicholas Hilliard. The four-hundredth anniversary of his death in
January 1619 is being marked by an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery,
London, which opens later this month.1 Among the discoveries that will be on
display is a miniature of Henri III of France, published in an article in this
issue (pp.102–11), which raises intriguing questions of how Hilliard is to be
remembered: British or European or both?
In his lifetime Nicholas Hilliard was by far the most
admired artist in England. John Donne wrote in his poem ‘The Storm’ that ‘a
hand, or eye / By Hilliard drawne, is
worth a history, / By a worse painter made’ and in a footnote to his celebrated
translation of Ariosto’s epic poem Orlando
Furioso, published in 1591, John Harington asserted that although ‘this
Realme hath not bred any Michel Angelos’, Britain can take pride in Hilliard,
‘our countryman’, who is ‘inferiour to none that lives at this day’.2 This
praise was the foundation of a fame that has never faded. Hilliard’s reputation
is based not only on the ‘very perfection’ of his paintings but also on the fact
that his art is ‘worth a history’ in the way that it encapsulates his age: when
we think of Elizabeth I, Hilliard’s miniatures of the ageless, jewel-encrusted
Gloriana immediately come to mind. The enshrinement of Elizabeth’s reign as a
golden age in English history and culture – a belief already established by the
mid-seventeenth century – meant that Hilliard’s paintings soon became images
infused with patriotism. The late sixteenth century was understood as the era when
England acquired its modern Protestant identity in its heroic stand against the
threat of Catholic Spain. It was only in the second half of the twentieth
century, when the fusion of religious and national identity was rapidly
dissolving, that scholars started to look at Hilliard in a different way. A
reassessment of his art is helped by the fact that he is so well documented,
notably in his engagingly frank letters and the autobiographical passages in
his treatise on miniature painting, ‘The Arte of Limning’. He is the first
British artist for whom sufficient materials survive for a full-scale
biography: the latest, which is likely to prove definitive, is published this
month by Elizabeth Goldring to coincide with the anniversary.3
Hilliard spent two substantial periods out of England. The accession
of Queen Mary in 1553 meant that his staunchly Protestant family thought it
best to keep a low profile, and Hilliard, then still a young boy, was sent
abroad, settling eventually in Geneva. He did not return until 1559, after
Elizabeth had succeeded her sister. Then, in 1576, when he was about
twenty-nine and a well-established artist, Hilliard moved to France, where he
worked for two years. Understanding of this period, traditionally thought of as
a relatively insignificant caesura in his career, now looms large in
assessments of his art, thanks to research by French as well as British
scholars. Recent discoveries such as the miniature of Henri III, or the
large-scale portraits of Elizabeth I and the British ambassador Sir Amias
Paulet, published in this Magazine last year, demonstrate that Hilliard worked
at the highest levels of French society.4 Among the revelations of the article
in this month’s issue is the suggestion that a miniature by Hilliard of an
unknown gentleman may be a portrait of the most celebrated French poet of the
sixteenth century, Pierre de Ronsard.
As a result, the image of Hilliard as one of the definers of
English identity is enlarged to encompass a cosmopolitan artist of European reputation.
His anniversary could therefore hardly be timelier, coinciding as it does with
the United Kingdom’s struggle to reshape its relationship with Europe. One
reason why it is helpful to reflect on the way that art of the past might
relate to ideas of British identity is that contemporary artists have played
such a disappointing part in the debates that have followed the referendum. It
is not surprising that artists overwhelmingly wish that the vote had gone the
other way, but their response has tended to confirm a belief that ‘remainers’
are experiencing a prolonged period of post-traumatic stress, evident in anger
and denial. It is perhaps unfair to single out Anish Kapoor, but his comments
on last month’s crushing parliamentary defeat of Theresa May’s Brexit proposals
sum up why this debate is so stuck. Brexit, he claims, ‘seems to have brought
out the very worst in us – Britain is more intolerant, more xenophobic, more
insular than I have known it to be since the 1970s’.5
The problem about such remarks is that there is no attempt to
see the issue from the point of view of those who think differently. Those who voted
in favour of leaving the European Union are likely to regard such an attitude
by a wealthy and successful artist as just another example of entitlement and
privilege. They might also reflect that the diversity that is constantly held
up as an ideal in the spaces of contemporary art does not seem to include
diversity of political opinion. But Kapoor is right to say also that ‘it is our
duty as citizens to find ways to come together and overcome the deeply sad and
disorienting effects of Brexit’. How this is to be done is a question that
should be asked most forcefully of those who when asked why they voted leave,
reply that they want to leave the European Union, not Europe. How do they
propose to reinforce Britain’s European identity? If quiet reflection on how to
advance beyond this impasse is wanted, two good places for the historically minded
to start are the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition and Goldring’s book.
1 Elizabethan
Treasures: Miniatures by Hilliard and Oliver (21st February– 19th May). A
conference, ‘Hilliard, Oliver and the Miniature in Context’, sponsored by the
Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the National Portrait Gallery,
the European Research Council and the University of Cambridge, will be held at
the Gallery on 28th– 29th March.
2 J. Harington: Orlando
Furioso in English Heroical Verse, London 1591, p.278.
3 E. Goldring: Nicholas
Hilliard: Life of an Artist, London 2019.
4 S. Bayliss, J.
Carey and E. Town: ‘Nicholas Hilliard’s portraits of Elizabeth I and Sir Amias
Paulet’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 160 (2018), pp.716–26.
5 Quoted in A. Shaw and A. Cole: ‘“A perfectly engineered
catastrophe”: artists speak out after Theresa May’s Brexit deal is crushed by
Parliament’, The Art Newspaper (16th
January 2019), www.theartnewspaper.com, accessed 17th January 2019.