Portrait miniature of an unknown woman

This modest work is an important early miniature portrait by John Hoskins, who originally trained as an oil painter. This work is datable to about 1615 and shows the still dominant influence of Nicholas Hilliard (1547-1619). The red curtain background is typical for this time, a development of the flat blue background of Elizabethan (later 16th-century) miniatures. Red paint is laid in flat, but the artist then used a wet brush to lift the red paint in strokes, giving the effect of folds in a curtain. Hoskins has also painted the woman's pearl earring using Hilliard's jewelling technique. This involved laying on a raised blob of white lead paint with some shadowing to one side. This was then crowned with a rounded touch of real silver that was burnished with, to quote Hilliard, ‘a pretty little tooth of some ferret or stoat or other wild little beast’. This brought the silver to a sparkling highlight, while actual gold is used to paint the pearl’s gold setting. Silver tarnishes with age, and so this pearl now appears black. Twenty years later Hoskins was painting pearls and gold in a more painterly fashion, using white and yellow paint rather than actual gold or silver. This change was influenced by Charles I's court painter, Anthony van Dyck, who arrived in London from Antwerp in 1632.

This miniature is catalogue number 19 in John Murdoch “Seventeenth-century English Miniatures in the Collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum” (1997).