Hilliard died in 1619, and appears to have been succeeded in his royal appointments and his professional work by his son Laurence, whose paintings so closely resemble those of the father that it is not always easy to distinguish the work of the two men. Very few of Laurence Hilliard's works are signed; there are two belonging to Earl Beauchamp, and one in the collection of Mr. Pierpont Morgan. The main feature of the son's work consists in the beauty of the calligraphy in the inscriptions around the portraits. It is clearer than the more formal handwriting of the father, but florid, full of exquisite curves and flourishes, and very elaborate, while the colour scheme adopted by the son is distinctly richer and more varied than that used by the father, and the composition is not quite so rigid and hard as was that of Nicholas.
The two Hilliards were, however, succeeded by two far greater men--the Olivers. One of them, Isaac, the father, was certainly Nicholas Hilliard's pupil, as the fact is mentioned more than once in Haydock's preface to his translation of Lomazzo. It seems to be possible that some of Isaac Oliver's works were copies of those of his master, and copies so accurately executed that it is not quite easy to determine respecting them. In the cabinet of Mr. Pierpont Morgan there is, for example, a miniature of Arabella Stuart which came from Walpole's collection. It has always borne the name of Hilliard, and Walpole himself was careful in the attributions he gave to his portraits, but in the Rijks Museum at Amsterdam there are two other portraits of the same lady, one of which is stated to be signed under the frame with the initials of Isaac Oliver, and there are two more, even more closely resembling it, in the collection at Sherborne Castle. The Morgan portrait is very characteristic of Hilliard, and the two in Amsterdam closely resemble it. Our suggestion for a solution of the difficulty is that the two Dutch portraits are early copies by Oliver from his master's work. Oliver was an extremely expert painter, and a far more clever man than Hilliard, for the pencil drawings of the painter and his wife, which belong to the Earl of Derby, reveal him as a draughtsman of consummate skill. He was probably of Huguenot descent, the son, it is believed, of a certain Peter Olivier (or Oliver), a native of Rouen, who was residing in London in 1571, and we may take it that his birth was in about 1566; his death occurred in 1617, and he was buried in the church of St. Anne's, Blackfriars.