Young Guy Among Roses by Nicholas Hilliard

 Nicholas Hilliard's 'Young Gentleman Amid Roses' has come to epitomise the romantic vision of the sonnet hero of Shakespeare's England. Tall, with handsome features, curly dark brown hair, and an incipient moustache, he leans with his hand on his heart against the trunk of a tree encircled by a bush of white roses.

 We know nothing of the miniature's history until the first decade of this century but since its entry into the Museum in 1910 it has come to be recognised not only as one of the most enigmatic of images to come down to us from the age of Elizabeth I but as the chef d'oeuvre of its greatest painter, Nicholas Hilliard.

 Queen Elizabeth's Master Painter

 The artist, Nicholas Hilliard (1547-1619), was a gentleman of Devon and the founder of the British School of miniature painting. The art of the Elizabethan miniature, which he created, and of which the greatest collection is here in the VA, was fashioned in the main by three influences each reflected in the 'Young Man'.

 The first of these was the portrait art of Hans Holbein, who, in his last years in England, had learned to paint minatures. 'Holbein's manner of limning', Hilliard wrote, 'I have ever imitated, and hold it for the best.' From Holbein's late style Hilliard developed the flat, linear, two-dimensional aesthetic which was to be the hall-mark of Elizabethan painting. Hilliard was miniaturist to the Queen and she too had very pronounced views on the art of portraiture. When she sat Hilliard describes how she placed herself, like the 'Young Man', 'in the open alley of a goodly garden' so that the light should be an open, even and direct one without any use of dramatic 'chiaroscuro'.

 The 'Young Man' has in addition a sinuous sophistication which was influenced by something else. For two years Hilliard worked in France. During that period he moved with assurance in the brilliant artistic world of the last Valois King, Henry III. The elegant pose of the Young Guy is directly derived from figures Hilliard had seen in the frescoes and plasterwork of the great palace of Fontainebleau and he was painting this miniature in the aftermath of the Queen's long romance with Francis, Duke of Anjou, her 'Frog'. The 'Young Gentleman Amongst Roses' distils the francophile atmosphere of the Tudor court in the 1580s.

 Elizabethan miniatures are painted in watercolour on vellum which has been mounted onto card, often a playing card. Normally they are much smaller, made to be kept in little, turned ivory cases in drawers, in cabinets or to be set into jewelled lockets and worn. They were often expressions of amorous dalliance, votive images given by a knight to his lady in pledge of devotion. And the 'Young Gentleman Between Roses' is precisely this, a declaration of love.