Nicholas Hilliard

“Elizabeth Goldring’s illustrated biography Nicholas Hilliard: Life of an Artist, published to coincide with a major centenary exhibition, tells his story with all the flair of her last book, an examination of the flamboyant and (for his day) selfie-loving Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester” —Suzi Feay, Financial Times

“Goldring’s engaging account of his life, character and artistic methods, supported by gorgeous illustrations and illuminating new archival discoveries, makes for a wonderful book, at once authoritative and full of pleasures.” —Helen Hackett, Literary Review

“Before you book your tickets [to the National Portrait Gallery’s Hilliard retrospective], read Elizabeth Goldring’s sumptuous survey Nicholas Hilliard: Life of an Artist. Goldring, whose previous book Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester and the World of Elizabethan Art, considered portraiture and patronage, has a fine, incisive eye. This is a scholarly book … but full of insight and courtly intrigue. [. . .] Goldring gives the bones of Hilliard’s biography [. . .] and his turbulent times [. . .] but more than that she encourages you to really look. [. . .]The close-up photographs of jewels and lace are a revelation.” – Laura Freeman, The Times

“Richly detailed and illuminating [. . .] If Hans Holbein fixed the appearance of Henry VIII’s court for the ages, it is Nicholas Hilliard who performed that service for Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth. His exquisite portrait miniatures captured not just her transition from youthful monarch to Virgin Queen to Gloriana but the constellation of her court. [. . .] for those sittings he would stare at the royal visage for hours from mere feet away. Perhaps no one else ever looked at her so intently. Goldring’s fascinating and beautifully produced book allows us to do something similar with the limner himself.” – Michael Prodger, The Sunday Times

"Elizabeth Goldring's engrossing, thickly illustrated biography shows that it was a rags-to-riches-and-back-again story. [. . .] This superb book vividly conjures a costly dresser and spendthrift, terrible with money, litigious, and sometimes slippery with creditors [. . .] Patrons bailed him out more than once, and his penultimate year was spent in Ludgate jail for debt. What humiliation for one who painted everyone who counted."—Philippa Stockley, Evening Standard

“A brilliant and definitive biography”—Jerry Brotton, Financial Times Weekend Magazine

“Scholarly”—Laura Gascoigne, The Spectator

“Superb”—Simon Wilson, RA Magazine

“A fascinating and beautifully produced life of the Elizabethan miniaturist”—The Sunday Times (‘Best Recent Books’)

An Apollo 'Off the Shelf' Selection (February 2019)

An Arts Society 'Good Reads' Selection (Spring 2019)

“A landmark scholarly biography . . . Goldring excavates the connections that let an Exeter goldsmith become an artist renowned at the courts of Europe. She has rescued a Renaissance in miniature”—Jonathan Jones, The Guardian

“Nicholas Hilliard not only allows us to study the artist and his gifts. It pulses too with the vivid conviction we find in JH Plumb's study of Walpole or Claire Tomalin's of Pepys. [. . .] Everyday lives in the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages are vividly rendered here. Goldring sharpens our ability to look beyond the glossy-magazine analogs of court painting and decipher, as with TS Eliot's vignette of the poet Webster, the skull beneath the skin. She is good, too, at placing Protestant Hilliard and his family in the context of the religious wars that threatened Britain for nearly a century and ravaged Europe for more than two. [. . .] At times Goldring's book reads like an Elizabethan version of a John le Carre novel [. . .] In spite of informed and scrupulous scholarship, with the author ever distinguishing what is known from what may reasonably be inferred, the narrative is unputdownable” —Grey Gowrie, The Financial Times

“Meticulous [. . .] lavishly illustrated [. . .] absorbing [. . .] a milestone in Hilliard studies” —James Hall, TLS

“Elizabeth Goldring’s absorbing and well-researched historical biography of Hilliard surveys the personal and professional life of the artist, and examines the personalities behind his portraits.” —Olenka Horbatsch, British Museum Magazine

“A fascinating and beautifully produced life of the Elizabethan miniaturist” —The Times (Best Books of the Year)

“An outstanding archivally-based biography [. . .] this essential hardback study of Protestant England's first native-born artist, with a brilliant European reputation across the Catholic Renaissance courts (magnificently and fully illustrated in colour), acts as a profound reminder of the diplomatic power of great art” —Stephen Lloyd, Art Quarterly

“The National Portrait Gallery's superb exhibition of Elizabethan miniatures closed last month but for those who missed it, Elizabeth Goldring's Nicholas Hilliard: Life of an Artist is worth the cover price for its beautiful close-up photographs alone.” —William Moore, Evening Standard (Best summer holiday reads)

“[A] rich and compelling new biography”—Mathew Lyons, History Today

"Goldring has unearthed each and every fact known about Hilliard (surprisingly many) and woven them into a contextualised, informative and well paced text [. . .] a superior publication [. . .] timely and scholarly" —Mike von Joel, State

“A comprehensive and almost certainly definitive life of Hilliard and a richly involving portrait of his time . . . This wonderfully detailed biography is also a seminar in Tudor-era artwork . . . Magnificent.”—Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Review

“A compelling and expansive artistic biography.”—C.A. Hanson, Choice

Winner of the 2019 Apollo Book of the Year Award, sponsored by Apollo: The International Art Magazine

Shortlisted for the Richard Schlagman Art Book Award, sponsored by the Whitechapel Gallery

Shortlisted for the 2019 Best First Biography Prize, sponsored by Slightly Foxed Magazine

Shortlisted for the William M. B. Berger Prize for British Art History

"This is a book I have long been waiting for, the first fully documented biography of Nicholas Hilliard setting him within the political, social and cultural worlds of his age. It will long remain the definitive work."—Roy Strong