The Secrets of Elizabethan Portrait Miniatures

In Elizabethan England, Nicholas Hilliard secured his place as the queen’s favorite portraitist by creating tiny, exquisitely detailed images in watercolor on vellum. Most of these miniatures, painted with a brush made out of squirrel hairs set in a bird quill and mounted on a wooden stick, are about the size of a jam jar lid. Some—including a pair depicting Elizabeth I and one of her favorite courtiers, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester—are considerably smaller, roughly the size of a fingernail.

Born in Exeter, in the west of England, around 1547, Hilliard was the first native-born English artist to achieve international fame. In addition to portraying Elizabeth, the so-called Virgin Queen, on multiple occasions, Hilliard painted virtually everybody who was anybody in late 16th- and early 17th-century England. Poets sang Hilliard’s praises: John Donne opined that a “hand or eye” drawn by the artist was worth a whole “history” by a lesser painter. On the European continent, Hilliard counted the Medici, the Valois and the Habsburgs among his many royal admirers.

Because of their size, miniatures had the great virtue of being portable. Thus, in an era long before the invention of photography—much less the instantly communicable imagery of the cellphone—miniatures helped create intimacy across great distances. Unsurprisingly, husbands and wives, fiancés and fiancées, and illicit lovers (as Elizabeth and Leicester were rumored to be) frequently traded such portraits. The exchange of miniatures also formed an integral part of diplomatic negotiations, especially those relating to royal and noble marriages. Miniatures commissioned by and for those of high rank were often encased in elaborate pieces of jewelry so they could be worn.

These intimate portraits sometimes elicited dramatic, emotionally charged responses. In 1596, Henri IV of France beheld a Hilliard miniature of Elizabeth “with passion and admiration,” then “kissed it twice or thrice.” In 1611, an English courtier who had stabbed his romantic rival in a jealous rage claimed to have been provoked by a miniature painted by Isaac Oliver, Hilliard’s most celebrated pupil. Apparently, the courtier’s wife had taken to wearing a miniature of the other man in an enameled gold locket “about her neck so low that she hid it under her breasts.”

Since the publication of my book Nicholas Hilliard: Life of an Artist, in 2019, I have periodically received emails from individuals who have stumbled across a miniature in the back of a cupboard or drawer, typically while clearing out their homes. More often than not, the portraits in question have had nothing to do with Hilliard. Occasionally, however, Hilliard miniatures previously unknown to scholars do come to light.

To piece together the stories behind these paintings, I have teamed up with Emma Rutherford, director of the Limner Company, a portrait miniature consultancy. Like detectives in an art historical cold-case unit, Rutherford and I have analyzed visual and documentary clues in an effort to solve mysteries dating back more than 400 years: Who are the sitters depicted in these long-forgotten portraits? Why—and for whom—were these diminutive images painted? As Rutherford says, “There is nothing like looking into the eyes of those in a portrait miniature to close the gap between past and present.”

Did you know? Elizabeth I, the “Virgin Queen”

• Elizabeth I refused to marry, proclaiming early in her reign that she was “already bound unto a husband, which is the kingdom of England.”
• Known as the “Virgin Queen” in recognition of her single status, Elizabeth was reluctant to bear children or name a relative as her heir. “Princes cannot like their own children,” she once told a Scottish diplomat. “Think you that I could love my own winding-sheet?”

A portrait of a lady, circa 1585-90

In the summer of 2024, I received an email from someone who had discovered a miniature in the back of a desk drawer in a country house in Ireland. The oval, head-and-shoulders portrait depicts a lady with auburn hair wearing court dress typical of the 1580s, including a white “cartwheel” ruff so large that it nearly fills the pictorial field. A note on the back, written in spidery cursive, read, “This picture of Queen Elizabeth is done from the life by either Old Hilliard or Old Isaac Oliver. It was given to me 1720 by a very old lady, a great-great-niece of one of the queen’s maids of honor.”

Based on the photos, Rutherford and I both believed that the miniature was likely to be Hilliard’s work. The ruff, for example, seemed to be a classic example of one of his signature techniques: the layering of white pigments of varying thicknesses to create a textured yet transparent image. Inspecting the portrait under magnification and in raking light (a technique used to examine a painting’s surface texture) alongside Alan Derbyshire, an expert in miniature conservation, left no doubt in our minds regarding its creator. But we were unconvinced that the sitter was Elizabeth herself.

The woman in the portrait has similar coloring to the queen and assumes a pose evocative of that seen in many of the miniatures Hilliard painted of Elizabeth between roughly 1583 and 1591. But our mystery sitter’s face is younger (and fuller) than the queen’s in these miniatures, her hairline less recessed. Additionally, the woman’s clothing and jewelry, although indicative of high rank, are not as opulent as those typically seen in portraits of Elizabeth. Perhaps the note on the back of the miniature held a clue. Did the story it recounted—though garbled in the retelling—contain a grain of truth?

If the woman in the portrait had served as a maid of honor to the queen, then Elizabeth Knollys, Lady Leighton—the monarch’s first cousin once removed—seemed to be the most plausible candidate. As Rutherford and I explained to the Guardian, which broke the news of this miniature’s discovery, Leighton possessed physical features, including curly auburn hair, that were very similar to those in the portrait. Moreover, she was at the heart of a group of courtiers who regularly commissioned work from Hilliard. In 1578, her sister Lettice Knollys had married Hilliard’s chief patron (and the queen’s rumored lover), Leicester.

What might have been the catalyst for such a commission? Perhaps the miniature was intended as a love token for the English adventurer and writer Walter Raleigh, whose love poetry includes a composition titled “A Poem Put Into My Lady Laiton’s Pocket.” Raleigh wrote, “Lady, farewell, whom I in silence serve! / Would God thou knewest the depth of my desire!”

Was this miniature a present for Raleigh to put into his pocket, thus reciprocating the gift of his love poem? As is always the case when dealing with 400-year-old mysteries, such questions may never be answered with certainty. This scenario, however, might help explain the Irish provenance of the miniature, as Raleigh served as the mayor of Youghal, in County Cork, between 1588 and 1589.

A portrait of an androgynous youth, circa 1592

In late 2024, I received another email out of the blue, this one concerning an oval miniature of an androgynous youth with delicate features and long, cascading ringlets of auburn hair. The sender had discovered the portrait in a box of odds and ends in an English country house. Because the sheets of vellum used for painting miniatures were onion-skin thin—and thus prone to curling at the edges—Hilliard and his contemporaries often affixed the vellum to an ordinary playing card to create a stiffer, more robust work surface. It is therefore not uncommon, when inspecting the back of a miniature that has been removed from its frame, to see hearts, diamonds, clubs or spades (or fragments thereof, depending on how the playing card was cut).

Studying the youth’s portrait, Derbyshire, Rutherford and I could just make out a red heart on the playing card used as a support. What stopped us in our tracks was the fact that, at some point in this miniature’s history, the heart on its reverse had been painted over, in black, with a spear. None of us had ever seen anything like it.

We harbored no doubt that the miniature was Hilliard’s work. It likely dates to the early 1590s, a period when the artist was experimenting with the use of a folded red velvet curtain as a backdrop. But identifying the sitter—and making sense of the way in which the heart on the playing card’s reverse had been defaced—was more difficult. Eventually, our research led us to a possible connection to William Shakespeare.

In an essay for the Times Literary Supplement, Rutherford, Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate and I argued that the most plausible sitter was Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton, who was famous at the late Elizabethan court for his androgynous beauty, including his unusually long hair. A known patron of Hilliard in the early 1590s, Southampton was also Shakespeare’s patron around this time. Provenance linking the miniature to the Southampton family supported the proposed identification.

The dedicatee of both Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594), Southampton has long been suggested as a possible model for the beautiful young man referenced in Shakespeare’s sonnets. Sonnet 20 immortalizes the “master-mistress of my passion,” while Sonnet 99 likens this fair youth’s hair to the marjoram plant, whose tendrils are long and curly.

It is impossible to determine when the heart on the back of the playing card was painted over. But the reaction is such a visceral one that it seems most likely to be the work of the miniature’s original recipient—that is, someone with a personal connection to Southampton. Indeed, it is difficult to see how this act of vandalism could be interpreted as anything other than an expression of a broken heart. As Rutherford says, “Both the desecration of the heart motif and the fact that the miniature had remained in a branch of the Southampton family suggested its deliberate return—much as modern lovers might return items of clothing in a breakup as an act of emotional finality.”

Could Southampton have presented this miniature to Shakespeare in the early 1590s, only for the Bard to later return it—perhaps around the time of the earl’s 1598 marriage—with the heart on its reverse now obliterated by a spear? Suggestively, the coat of arms that Shakespeare obtained for his family in the 1590s featured, as a visual pun on his surname, a spear almost identical to that on the back of this miniature.

A portrait of Elizabeth’s forgotten heir

These and other recently identified Hilliard miniatures paint an evocative portrait of the Elizabethan court. They testify, too, to the pervasiveness, in late 16th-century England, of the language of courtly love, which found expression in Hilliard’s art, as well as in the poetry of Raleigh, Shakespeare and others. To hold a miniature in the hand or up to the eye today is to experience a powerful sense of connection to the past: not just to the artist who painted it but also to the sitter depicted and to the portrait’s original recipient.

In some instances, such images can also illuminate the intersection of art, religion and politics in the Elizabethan period. A previously unknown cabinet miniature of Lady Arbella Stuart, which was discovered in 2023, serves as a case in point. As Rutherford and I wrote in a 2024 essay for the Burlington magazine, this image was part of an elaborate web of espionage designed to thwart Protestant England’s archenemy, Philip II, the Catholic king of Spain.

Just 16 when she posed for Hilliard in the summer of 1592, in a garden at Greenwich Palace, Arbella was a great-great-granddaughter of Henry VII and thus one of a handful of viable successors to the aging, childless Elizabeth.

As Rutherford and I discovered by piecing together clues from court correspondence and other documentary sources, this portrait was the product of a plot devised by Elizabeth’s spymasters to trick the Spanish king into believing that Arbella—potentially the next queen of England—was on the verge of marrying the son of one of his key Catholic allies, Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma. The exchange of miniatures had long been part and parcel of dynastic marriage negotiations. This one was effectively commissioned as a prop in a high-stakes game of religious and political brinkmanship.

Arbella did not, in the end, marry Parma’s son. Nor did she ascend to the throne upon Elizabeth’s death, in 1603. But Hilliard’s portrait—which captures Arbella at a moment when she was widely seen as a queen-in-waiting—acts as a tangible, emotive link to one of English history’s great what-ifs.