Elizabethan Treasures — Miniatures by Hilliard and Oliver


Fabulous exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery looking at portrait miniatures by Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver.

This show displays these small jewel like items really well and manages to pace the show well despite the crowds with magnifying glasses thronging the display cases. It leads you around in a chronological narrative with gentle themes woven into that. The show gives you a picture of the lives of these two artists and of the courts they worked for. As ever with shows showing a generation of sitters you come away with lots of stores to look up.

I loved the section on Hilliards trip to France including a never shown before portrait by him of Henry III and the twin portraits in big of Elizabeth I and Sir Amyas Paulet, the English Ambassador to Paris, which are thought to have hung in his studio in Paris. There was also a good section on images of Elizabeth and how these were controlled. I loved seeing Oliver’s wonderful detailed drawing of her which was used for an engraving.

In the Jacobean section I was much amused by the pictures of courtiers in masque’s painted by Oliver. The ladies of the court seemed very quick to whip their breasts out for those entertainments. These contrasted rather wonderfully with the heavily symbolic pictures of melancholy young men.

All this being said it was just magically to see so many stunning, blue backed detailed faces from the past looking out at you, showing off their finery and apparently frozen in time. 

Closes on 19 May 2019

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