A U N I QU E A N D C O M P E L L I N G I M AG E
Oliver is surely the missing link who explains the advent of Nicholas Lanier, a man who was endowed with what we call an eye and who was to acquire a taste for collecting drawings, something completely new in Jacobean England. All the evidence indicates that Oliver was in France and the Netherlands in the 1570s and early 1580s. We know that he was in Venice in 1596 and evidence that he may have been aware of an altarpiece Rubens painted in Rome in 1609 indicates that he could have been in Italy again then. From the 1580s onwards Oliver was to produce a steady stream of drawings, often highly finished ones, works of art in their own right. They reveal, as I wrote, ‘someone probably trained in France, who practises drawing from the life, who knows about linear and aeriel perspective, who has been in direct contact with the work of artists at the Valois court and who can start from a premise that a drawing can be a work of art in its own right, an idea which was not referred to in England until well into the first decade of the next century.’ As early as the 1430s Alberti had recognised a drawing could be a work of art in its own right but it was not until 1606 that Henry Peacham in his Arte of Drawing presented it as a skill worthy of cultivating by the aspiring classes in England. Oliver would have been surely the person who opened the eyes of his young cousin Lanier. Vertue records a visual testament to their relationship which was in the collection of James II: ‘two heads in one Frame in limning one Lanier the other Isaac Oliver. 11 Oliver, unlike Hilliard, did drawings preparatory to his miniatures.Vertue records seeing a sketchbook full of them, including ones of the Queen and the Countess of Arundel.12 But in the context of the year of the Lanier portrait, 1613, there is a further twist because in December 1612, only months before this picture was painted, in the funeral procession of Prince Henry (fig.7), Isaac Oliver walked as his ‘paynter’ and a Mark Bilford as his limner. So far Oliver has been written out of large-scale Jacobean portraiture but his oil paintings were known to Vertue. He saw a group of them which had descended, along with a large collection of Oliver’s subject drawings, to the painter Theodore Russell whose son, Anthony, was Vertue’s informant.‘Isaac Oliver the Limner certainly painted in Oyl very well’, he wrote. He goes on to describe a subject picture of John the Baptist, the model being a gardener:
‘… the face apeard to be a man of 50 years Old. Painted certainly from the Life for the face & hands were tinctur’d with the sun as most Labouring men are.The body of a paler & Clearer colouring. The drapery well folded the Landskip & sky not so well finiosh’d – the face painted with a pointed pencil, the hair curiously neat the Eys nose & mouth firmly drawn. & the whole head for strength of Colouring, light and shade. Of great force highly and perfectly finisht equal I think to any of those Masters of that time of day. The hands well drawn & the whole in a great manner ‘tho wanting the Sublime…’ 13
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6. For which see Mary Edmond, ‘Limners and Picturemakers’, Walpole Society, XVII, 1978-80, pp. 63-224. 7. Ibid., pp. 77-8. 8. Ibid., loc.cit. 9. Ibid., p.90. 10. For Oliver see Roy Strong, The English Renaissance Miniature, London, 1983, pp. 142-85; Jill Fensten, Isaac Oliver, Garland Publications, 1981; Mary Edmond, Hilliard and Oliver. The lives and works of two great miniaturists, London, 1983; Roy Strong and V. J. Murrell, Artists of the Tudor Court. The Portrait Miniature Rediscovered 1520-1620 (Exh. cat., Victoria & Albert Museum, London,z 1983), London, 1983, pp. 97-116. 11. Roy Strong, The English Renaissance Miniature, p. 197 note 16. 12. Ibid., p.151.