Isaac Oliver is believed to have been born at Rouen in France in 1560. He was the son of the Huguenot goldsmith Pierre Olivier and his wife Epiphany.  The documented facts about Isaac’s early life are few and little is known.  He was in London with his family in 1568, after they had fled France to escape persecution in the Wars of Religion.   In 1577 he was still recorded as resident in London, but a drawing by him from 1586 of The Lamentation has an inscription which suggests it was produced at Tournai in France. It has therefore been suggested by some authorities that he returned to mainland Europe, probably the Netherlands, in order to serve an apprenticeship. There are therefore effectively ten ‘lost’ years between 1577 and 1587, where it is unknown where Oliver was based and the nature of his artistic training. However, his soft, illusionistic style of painting clearly demonstrates that he was not trained in England. His first miniatures (then called limnings) date from 1587. According to the writer Richard Haydocke, who knew Hilliard, Oliver was Hilliard’s ‘well profitting scholar’.  It seems certain that Oliver did not serve a traditional seven-year apprenticeship with Hilliard, but was already a fully-formed artist, when he commenced studying the techniques of miniature painting with Hilliard at his premises in Gutter Lane. Oliver’s early miniatures are not dependent on Hilliard stylistically, but instead demonstrate the influence of contemporary portrait engravings, especially the work of the Netherlandish engraver and painter Hendrik Goltzius (1558-1617).  Unlike Hilliard, Oliver used light and shadow (chiaroscuro) to give a three-dimensional realism to his portraits. Hilliard wrote in his Treatise concerning the Art of Limning ‘None should meddle with limning but gentlemen alone’ and went on to record conversations with the Queen on portrait painting, which, they agree, is ‘best in plain lines without shadowing.’ In 1595 Oliver travelled Venice, as demonstrated by an inscription on a miniature; but again no details are known of that journey or the reasons for it.  In the 1590s Oliver became a formidable rival to his former teacher Hilliard, but he generally dispensed with the emblematic trappings that festooned portraits of the Elizabethan era. The death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603 transformed his fortunes. Oliver’s style, more naturalistic than Hilliard’s, earned him the patronage of the new court of King James I, he being a particular favourite of the Prince of Wales, Prince Henry Frederick and Queen Anne of Denmark.  Oliver was married three times, his first wife dying 1599.  In 1602 he married Sara, the sister of the oil painter Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder and thus became intimately connected with a number of the outstanding families of expatriate painters, who made up a large part of the London artistic community in the late Elizabethan and the Jacobean eras, such as the Gheeraerts and the de Critzes. In 1605 Oliver was appointed Limner to Queen Anne and between 1609 and 1612 served as Limner and Painter to Prince Henry Frederick. From 1612 until his death, he performed the same role for the Prince of Wales (later King Charles I – no mean art connoisseur himself). Oliver is known to have executed full-size portraits and he has been suggested as the painter of a number of works currently attributed to his contemporary William Larkin. It is to be assumed that Oliver’s first wife died from natural causes, for in 1606, Oliver married Elizabeth Harding, who was probably the daughter of a court musician. Oliver’s eldest son, Peter Oliver (c.1594-1674) trained with his father as a miniature painter and also worked in his workshop at Blackfriars in London. Consequently it is hard to distinguish the work of father and son in the period 1610-17. However, Oliver was one of the first artists working in England to produce a body of drawings which demonstrate a wide knowledge of Continental art. This was made possible through his own French origins, Continental travel and the study of prints and engravings. Isaac Oliver expired at his house in Blackfriars in 1617. Some of his work is housed in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle and some of his pen drawings may be found in the collection of the British Museum. His painting Madonna and Child in Glory may be found in the collection of the Beaverbrook Art Museum in Canada. A small number of his miniatures may be found in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Oliver’s portrait of Edward Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury may be seen above.