The survival of these two portraits as a pair is a fascinating insight into the patronage of rival artists at two distinct courts. Although father and son are portrayed here, their artistic preferences were far more distant than their personal relationship.

Nicholas Hilliard became limner to James I after Elizabeth I died in 1603. Hilliard’s status and importance in fashioning the late Queen’s image was such that his continued appointment at court represented stable continuity at the change of monarch. Though based in Scotland, James would have had access to Hilliard’s portrait miniatures which were sent to the Edinburgh court.[1] As Elizabeth Goldring points out in her biography of the artist, after his accession James was keen to accentuate his ‘Englishness’ to all – using Hilliard so openly to paint not only his own image, but to design seals and medals was a way of promoting this.[2]

In contrast, the court of James’s wife, Queen Anne, and that of his eldest son, Henry, Prince of Wales, favoured Hilliard’s chief rival and former pupil, Isaac Oliver. Although Hilliard was commissioned to paint Henry as a young boy, by the time the prince established his own household at the age of sixteen in 1610 (as Prince of Wales) Oliver was his chief image-maker.[3]

This portrait of James I, previously unrecorded but miraculously surviving with its pendent of his son, Henry, Prince of Wales, shows him wearing a white doublet with jewelled gold buttons and the Garter badge suspended from a blue ribbon around his neck. A larger version of the present miniature, showing James painted in this same costume is in the Royal Collection and is dated 1614.[4]

The portrait of Henry can be dated to the year of his death, 1612, or possibly later to circa 1614 when the portrait of his father James was painted. However, the portrait would appear to be a highly individualised one, with the armour the same design as that shown in the cabinet miniature by Oliver in the Royal Collection of the young prince, where the Garter ribbon passes over his shoulder.[5] However, although the armour is the same in both portraits, the present work displays significant variations, the prince looking slightly younger, his face more rounded and childlike and the ruff shorter.

The two miniatures are rare in both their extremely small scale and in remaining as a pair. In terms of scale, they mimic the pair of Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, now in a private collection but illustrated in numerous publications.[6] Clearly designed to remain together, they were most likely commissioned as part of the mourning which followed the unexpected death of Henry at the age of eighteen.

[1] For example, portraits of Lady Rich and Elizabeth I were sent to the Scottish court between 1589 and 1596. James’s grandmother and mother also both sat to Hilliard.

[2] E. Goldring, Nicholas Hilliard; Life of an Artist, Yale, 2019, p. 251.

[3] Hilliard painted Henry in 1607, three years before he became Prince of Wales (RCIN 420893).

[4] Royal Collection Trust RCIN 420053.

[5] Royal Collection Trust RCIN 420058.

[6] For example, in E. Goldring, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and the World of Elizabethan Art: Painting and Patronage at the Court of Elizabeth I, Yale University Press, 2014, this pair are illustrated on the back of the book sleeve.