No date is inscribed on this miniature, but everything about the sitter’s costume and jewellery suggests that it is a product of the early years of James I’s reign, with the first half of the 1610s being the most likely window. Pearls, particularly pear-shaped ones – as seen in the sitter’s hair and suspended from her left ear – were the height of fashion at the early Jacobean court.[1] So, too, the hairstyle depicted here, in which the hair (after being crimped, if not naturally curly) was fastened at the back in a bun such that both the forehead and ear lobes remained exposed.[2] Thin strands of black silk – like those from which the sitter’s bejewelled pendant cross has been suspended – were also much in vogue as a means of emphasising ‘the prized pale skin of elite women’.[3] Although the jewels in the pendant – almost certainly intended to be understood as diamonds – now appear black, this is because Oliver (like Nicholas Hilliard, under whom he trained) painted them with real silver which has tarnished with the passage of time. By the same token, the black dots seen on the pearls are the result of real silver having oxidised. Whether Oliver squirted garlic juice on his miniatures in an effort to prevent the silver from tarnishing, as Hilliard is reputed to have done, is unrecorded.[4]

The most striking feature of the sitter’s costume, and the one that is most helpful for establishing a likely date range for this miniature, is the fact that both the ruff and the lacework on the dress are yellow rather than white. [5] This colour, which was created with a saffron-based dye and starch, was particularly fashionable during the first half of the 1610s. But yellow ruffs and lacework gained notoriety – and began to fall from favour in polite society – – after Mrs Anne Turner, who held a monopoly on the supply of of saffron (and also ran at least two houses of ill repute), was hanged at Tyburn in November 1615 for her role in the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury two years earlier. According to some accounts, Sir Edward Coke, Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, condemned her to be hanged in a yellow ruff; other accounts state that it was the hangman who wore a yellow ruff to Mrs Turner’s execution.[6] Whatever the case, moralists had a field day, equating yellow with immorality and the decadence of court life. By about 1620, the fashion for yellow ruffs and lacework had completely died out.

The sitter in this miniature once was said to depict Katherine Hastings, née Dudley (c. 1538–1620), the youngest surviving daughter of John Dudley (1504– 1553), Duke of Northumberland, who married Henry Hastings (c. 1535–1595), 3rd Earl of Huntingdon, in 1553.[7] However, as Graham Reynolds noted when this miniature was exhibited at the V&A in 1947, it ‘almost certainly does not represent this lady’, who would have been in her seventies when it was painted.[8] It may never be possible to pin down the sitter’s identity, but she was clearly a lady of means, given the richness of her costume and jewellery, which also reveals her to have been attentive to the latest fashions. That her hair is worn up rather than down suggests that she was married when she sat to Oliver.[9] As nothing about the sitter’s selfpresentation suggests rebelliousness, it seems probable that this miniature dates from no later than 1615, the year of Mrs Turner’s execution (though Oliver’s death, in 1617, provides an absolute cut-off point). And for whose eyes might this image have been intended? Given that miniatures were inherently private, personal and intimate, perhaps this one was a gift for the lady’s husband, the pairing of a low-necked bodice with a large, starched ruff having been considered by the Jacobeans a seductive combination evocative of both freedom and restriction.[10]

Oliver must have been in his late fifties or early sixties when he painted this miniature. Nonetheless, his work – in particular his rendering of the bone structure of the sitter’s face and of the fine details of her costume and jewellery – remains of the highest quality.

[1] Scarisbrick, Jewellery in Britain, 1066–1837, pp. 120–21.



[2] Georgine de Courtais, Women’s Headdress and Hairstyles in England from AD 600 to the Present Day (London, 1973),

pp.62-63 (and Fig.114).



[3] Reynolds, In Fine Style, p. 77.

[4] For the claims, by early seventeenth-century miniature painters, that Hilliard was an advocate of this technique, see Jeffrey M. Muller and Jim Murrell (eds.), Edward Norgate: Miniatura or the Art of Limning (New Haven and London, 1997), pp. 202, 218, 227.



[5] For the rise and fall of this fashion, see Ribeiro, Fashion and Fiction, pp. 172–75; and Reynolds, In Fine Style, p. 62.

[6] For Mrs Turner, see Alastair Bellany, ‘Mistress Turner’s Deadly Sins: Sartorial Transgression, Court Scandal and Politics in Early Stuart England,’ Huntington Library Quarterly, 58.2 (1995), pp. 179-210.

[7] This traditional identification was assigned to the miniature, in inverted commas, when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1938, albeit the curators noted (correctly) that the sitter looked ‘too young to be her’; see Burlington House, Exhibition of Seventeenth Century Art in Europe (exh. cat., 1938), pp. 225-26 (no. 768).

[8] Graham Reynolds, Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver: An Exhibition to Commemorate the 400th Anniversary of the Birth of Nicholas Hilliard (exh. cat., London, 1947), p. 44 (no.189).

[9] See Ribeiro, Fashion and Fiction, p. 60. For a married woman, long, undressed hair would only have been depicted in the context of a court masque or a bedroom/dressing room scene depicting the sitter at her toilette.

[10] See Ribeiro, Fashion and Fiction, pp. 174–75, who discusses this combination of elements in relation to a portrait of Frances Howard, c. 1615.