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This is an exceptionally crisp and vivid example of Oliver’s art. Note, for example, the delicacy with which the individual hairs in the sitter’s beard, moustache and eyebrows (and on his proper left temple) have been rendered. Note, too, the careful delineation of each individual eye lash. In many ways, this portrait is comparable to Oliver’s virtuoso cabinet miniature, signed ‘IO’ and dated 1598, depicting The Browne Brothers: Anthony Maria Browne, 2nd Viscount Montague, flanked by his younger brothers, John and William, with an unidentified man (perhaps a servant) standing off to the right (Burghley House; fig. 7). In both works, Oliver has depicted his sitters’ black doublets and white collars with great precision, down to and including the intricate geometrical patterns of the lace edging on their collars.
It has been suggested that the sitter in this miniature might be Francis Hastings (1560–1595), eldest son and heir of George Hastings (1540–1604), 4th Earl of Huntingdon.[1] The basis for such an...
This is an exceptionally crisp and vivid example of Oliver’s art. Note, for example, the delicacy with which the individual hairs in the sitter’s beard, moustache and eyebrows (and on his proper left temple) have been rendered. Note, too, the careful delineation of each individual eye lash. In many ways, this portrait is comparable to Oliver’s virtuoso cabinet miniature, signed ‘IO’ and dated 1598, depicting The Browne Brothers: Anthony Maria Browne, 2nd Viscount Montague, flanked by his younger brothers, John and William, with an unidentified man (perhaps a servant) standing off to the right (Burghley House; fig. 7). In both works, Oliver has depicted his sitters’ black doublets and white collars with great precision, down to and including the intricate geometrical patterns of the lace edging on their collars.
It has been suggested that the sitter in this miniature might be Francis Hastings (1560–1595), eldest son and heir of George Hastings (1540–1604), 4th Earl of Huntingdon.[1] The basis for such an identification is unclear, but may owe something to the fact that several late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English miniatures collected by Lord Bearsted traditionally have been identified as individuals with links to the Hastings earls of Huntingdon. No secure image of Francis Hastings – who, had he not died before his father, would have become 5th Earl of Huntingdon – is known to survive. However, the square-cut beard sported by this sitter makes such an identification unlikely. Hastings died in 1595, whereas the fashion for beards like this one did not take off at the Elizabethan court until late 1596, when Robert Devereux (1565–1601), 2nd Earl of Essex, returned to England in triumph after the sack of Cadiz, having, in the words of the Venetian ambassador to England, begun ‘to grow a beard, which he used not to wear’.[2]
Essex himself also has been proposed as the sitter. [3] It is true that Essex, shortly after his return from Cadiz, commissioned Oliver to create a template for the production of portrait miniatures not dissimilar to this one, the ‘face of Cadiz’ having been an integral part of Essex’s attempts, in the second half of the 1590s, to position himself as a serious political and military leader. [4] Indeed, Essex seems to have been the first non-royal patron to have commissioned replica portrait miniatures in bulk for distribution at the English court.[5] Examples – dateable to c. 1596–98 and closely related to an Oliver drawing of c.1596 now at the Yale Center for British Art – may be found in the Royal Collection, the National Portrait Gallery, the V&A, and at Burghley House (figs. 8-9).
As can be seen from these images, as well as from the many other portraits generally accepted as depictions of Essex that survive from the late 1580s onwards – by Nicholas Hilliard, William Segar and Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, among others – Essex was thinner, and possessed of more angular features, than the gentleman portrayed in the Bearsted miniature (figs.10-12).[6] Yet there is clearly some sort of visual dialogue at play between the template Oliver created for Essex and his portrayal of this unidentified young man. Each is shown in head and shoulders against a plain background, pivoted slightly to his right, clad in a black doublet with a white, lace-trimmed collar.[7] In all probability, the choice of black and white was a deliberate allusion to the fact that these were Elizabeth I’s colours; indeed, portraits of Essex from the late 1580s onwards, when he first emerged as a royal favourite, almost always depicted him in black and white. Unlike our unidentified sitter (who seems not to have been a Knight of the Garter), Essex (as portrayed by Oliver) also wears a blue ribbon around his neck from which the Lesser George would have been suspended.
In all likelihood, the subject of the Bearsted miniature was a follower of Essex, perhaps one of the men who served under him on the victorious Cadiz expedition, many of whom – as a mark of allegiance to Essex – also began wearing square-cut beards on their return to England. Sir Richard Leveson (c. 1570–1605), who was knighted for services rendered at Cadiz, not only grew such a beard, but took a further leaf from Essex’s book by sitting to Oliver, presumably after having seen, or having been gifted, one of Oliver’s miniatures of Essex. Three virtually identical miniatures of Leveson by Oliver survive: in the Wallace Collection (fig. 13), the Portland Collection (Welbeck Abbey) and at Charlecote Park (National Trust).[8] In each, the bearded Leveson, like Essex, has been depicted in head and shoulders against a plain background, pivoted slightly to his right, clad in a black doublet with a white collar (the width of which may indicate that Leveson sat to Oliver a few years after Essex). Leveson, who had light brown hair tinged with red, is clearly not the same man depicted in the Bearsted miniature. But presumably our unidentified sitter was someone who – like Leveson – wished to advertise his loyalty to Essex and, perhaps, to celebrate and record any contribution he had made to the sack of Cadiz.
Essex, of course, would be executed for treason in 1601 – and, in many ways, had fatally blotted his copybook in the eyes of Elizabeth I by about 1600, perhaps even as early as 1599. But no one in the immediate aftermath of Essex’s triumphant return from Cadiz could have predicted that this would be his fate. For men like Leveson – and the unidentified sitter in the Bearsted miniature – proclaiming their loyalty to Essex would have seemed a shrewd political move c. 1596–98, when, as the Venetian ambassador observed, the earl was ‘a great favourite with the Queen’.[9] Such a date range is consistent, too, with this miniature’s stylistic affinities to Oliver’s The Browne Brothers, which is inscribed, in gold, in its upper left corner ‘Ano Dom. 1598.'
[1] This was first suggested in 1938 by the curators of the Burlington House/Royal Academy’s Exhibition of Seventeenth Century Art in Europe (exh. cat., London, 1939), p. 224, cat. 764, and subsequently repeated as a possibility when the miniature was exhibited at the V&A in 1947 (Reynolds, Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver, p. 40, cat. 145).
[2] Horatio F. Brown (ed.), Calendar of State Papers Relating to English Affairs in the Archives of Venice, vol. 9, 1592-1603
(London, 1897), item 505 (2 November 1596).
[3] The suggestion, by the curators of the 1938 Royal Academy exhibition, that the sitter might be Francis Hastings was designed to rebut what, prior to that date, had been the traditional identification of the sitter as ‘Robert, Earl of Essex’ (Exhibition of Seventeenth Century Art in Europe (exh. cat., London, 1939), p. 224, cat. 764). When the miniature was exhibited at the V&A in 1947, Graham Reynolds left open both possibilities, though he did not seem entirely convinced by either suggestion (Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver, p. 40, cat. 145).
[4] Circa 1596, Essex also commissioned Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger to create a template for the reproduction of oil portraits in great depicting him with his new beard, the most famous example of which (now at Woburn Abbey) depicts the bearded Essex life-sized and full-length, with Cadiz burning in the background. The term ‘face of Cadiz’ was coined by Paul E. J. Hammer, in The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585–1597 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), who also has an excellent general discussion of Essex’s use of portraiture for political ends, pp. 199–211.
[5] Catharine MacLeod was the first to make this point, in ‘Isaac Oliver and the Essex Circle,’ in British Art Studies: Elizabethan and Jacobean Miniature Paintings in Context (ed. Catharine MacLeod and Alexander Marr) (Paul Mellon
Centre for Studies in British Art and Yale University Press, 2020), https: //britishartstudies-17. netlify.app/isaac-oliver-and-the-essex-circle/. As MacLeod notes, ‘Oliver’s miniature of Essex, […] featuring the proudly worn beard of the Cadiz expedition, exists in more versions than any other miniature’ by Oliver.
[6] Written descriptions of Essex confirm this impression. According to the Venetian ambassador to England, describing Essex in November 1596, on his return from Cadiz, he was ‘tall, but wiry’. See Brown, Calendar of State Papers.
[7] In Essex’s case, the white collar is surmounted by a small white ruff.
[8] These are discussed in greater detail in MacLeod, op. cit. [n. 5], where it is noted that, aside from Essex’s own image, ‘the most replicated miniature by Oliver of the late Elizabethan period is that of Sir Richard Leveson’.
[9] Brown, Calendar of State Papers
