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As his fame grew, Hilliard took on many students, among them a Huguenot émigré, Isaac Oliver, who in later years displaced him in court favor. Oliver, whose miniatures were also on display last week, employed more subdued colors and stronger modeling in his faces. Hilliard disapproved: "A picture a little shadowed may be borne withal for the rounding of it, but so greatly smutted or darkened as some use disgrace it, and is like truth ill told." In his pictures of the Queen, Hilliard dutifully suppressed the shadows of Elizabeth's aging face, contented himself with pink flesh tints, the conventional tapering Elizabethan features, and recording with a jeweler's delight the colors of emerald, sapphire, ruby and topaz.
When Hilliard died in 1619, he was relatively poor; he had lived too much of the Elizabethan high life. Good artists, he wrote, "are commonly no misers, but liberal above their little degree . . . they are much given to practices, to find out new skills . . . to travel, and to confer with wise men, to fare meetly well and serve their fantasies."