Born in Exeter in 1547, the same year that Henry VIII died, Nicholas Hiliard may not be a household name today.

But suppose I asked you to imagine Lisbeth I. The chances are that what you would see in your mind's eye

is an image painted by Hiliard. His images have become our images.

Who was this man? How did he rise to become the first English-born court painter and then fall to be imprisoned at the age of 70?

How is the life of this individual like a lens through which we can see the political and religious changes of the second half of the 16th century up close, magnified?

What is his legacy today?

Here to discuss the technicaler of Hiliard's life and his paintings is Dr. Elizabeth Goldring, honorary reader at the University of Warwick's Center for the Study of the Renaissance.

Her book, Nicholas Hiliard Life of an Artist, was published in 2019 to mark the 400 anniversary of Hiliard's death and to coincide with the National Portrait Gallery's Elizabethan Treasures exhibition.

Dr. Goldring, I'm really, really pleased that you've joined me to talk about Hiliard because there are so many questions to ask about him and your work on him is so groundbreaking such detective work that you've done that we'll talk about in due course that it's a real honour that you've come to join us.

Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here and it's interesting that you mentioned the detective work angle.

Because for me that's what is always most fun about history is that sense of trying to solve a mystery and trying to piece clues together and it really felt like that with the Hillier books.

So it's interesting that that came through and that makes me very happy to hear that.

Let's start, given that we're talking about Hiliard with the micro, with the miniature. He is most famed for his miniatures.

Can you describe them to us how big they are, what they were made from?

Absolutely. Well, the answer to that changes slightly over the course of his career. But I guess what we might think of as the classic Kiliard and what he started off painting in the early 1570s and what really made his name were tiny head and shoulders portraits on sheets of them about the size of a jam jar lid or a modern watch face.

He pretended initially to be circular. He later gravitated towards oval formats. Typically the sitter is portrayed against a plain blue background and there is an inscription in gold around the rim that perhaps gives the date and the sitter's age.

As time passed, Hiliard introduced all sorts of innovations. He gravitated from round to oval. He tended to experiment with different colors of background. Eventually branched out into something called cabinet miniatures.

More the size of a penguin paperback or an iPhone and often rectangular in shape and with all sorts of background props and features of the sort you might expect in a large scale oil painting.

But he never stopped making the classic Kiliard the round head and shoulders portrait with a blue background.

And it seems that even at the end of his career, the sitter's who were going to just commission one picture from him in the course of their lives. If there was just going to be one, they wanted it to be the classic Kiliard, the one that had made his name.

How would Hiliard have painted these miniatures? What was his process?

Interestingly enough, he doesn't seem to have done preliminary drawings. He seems to have worked directly on the film.

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