Portrait of Anne Hyde, Duchess of York

About this work

Though knowledge about his birth and training remain obscure, Nicholas Dixon is known to have been a favorite miniature painter of the English court at the close of the seventeenth century. He succeeded Samuel Cooper (1608/9–1672) as limner to King Charles II in 1673 and was Keeper of the King’s Picture Closet, for which he was granted an irregularly paid annuity of £200. Dixon painted a substantial number of ambitiously scaled miniatures—which became increasingly uncommon among practitioners of the art form when the more constrictive support of ivory supplanted vellum in the early 1700s. Dixon often signed his work with the monogram ND, and many of his large cabinet miniatures were copies of portraits, religious scenes, and mythological paintings by old masters, thirty of which formed part of the collection of the dukes of Portland. Among the characteristics of his style are ruddy flesh tones and drowsy eyes, and like the work of John Hoskins (c. 1590–1665), who may have been his teacher, Dixon favored softer modeling and diffuse lighting of his subjects, as opposed to the dramatic shadows employed by Cooper. Two lottery schemes—one in 1684/85 and the other in 1698— involving…