Lovers' Eye
A lover's eye is a painted miniature of an eye on ivory, set into a brooch or pendant - an English special form of sentimental jewellery in which the identifying face is absent and only the eye remains.
Written by Dr. Helene Vasall
The lover's eye is the most enigmatic form in English sentimental jewellery. It is not a technique of its own in the narrower sense - the painting method corresponds to classic miniature painting on ivory - but a precisely defined choice of image: instead of a full portrait, only the eye of the sitter appears. This small iconographic shift fundamentally changes the social function of the jewel.
The invention of the genre
The historically accepted moment of birth lies in November 1785. The future King George IV, then twenty-three, had become secretly engaged to Maria Fitzherbert - a Catholic widow with whom, under the English Royal Marriages Act of 1772, a marriage without the king's consent was invalid. The two exchanged portrait miniatures, but not a complete likeness - only the eye of the other. The images were set in gold mounts so small that they could be worn hidden beneath clothing.
The royal affair was never officially acknowledged, but from 1786 it was an open secret in London society. Within two years the eye miniature had become a fashion among the English aristocracy and the upper middle classes. The workshops - Richard Cosway, Andrew Plimer and George Engleheart are the most important - produced lovers' eyes in increasing numbers during the 1790s.
Composition
The pieces follow a narrow pictorial rule. The eye is usually:
- frontal or slightly in three-quarter profile
- shown with a discernible eyebrow and part of the surrounding eye area
- painted in watercolour on ivory (1.5 to 3 cm in height)
- set in gold, often bordered with pearls
The eyes are individual portraits - the colour of the iris, the lashes and the brows are painted so precisely that the sitter was unmistakable to the wearer. Outsiders could not, and were not meant to, recognise whose eye it was.
Variations:
- With tear(s) - small pearl-set drops along the lower edge of the image, a mourning sign
- With a cloud background - the eye looks out as if from a sky; a later variant, from 1800 onwards
- With a hollow setting for a lock on the reverse - a lock of the sitter's hair
- As a brooch, pendant, bracelet link or ring bezel - the pendant is the most common form
The mourning variant
About a third of the surviving pieces are unambiguously mourning jewellery. They can be identified by three features:
- Pearl tears along the lower edge of the image
- Black enamel mounts instead of the usual gold setting
- An inscription on the reverse with a date of death or In memory of
Such pieces were mostly commissioned after the death of a spouse or a beloved family member - the eye of the deceased was painted from an existing portrait miniature or from a description. In some cases they were posthumous works made without a living model.
The workshops
English miniature painting of the Georgian period was a profession in its own right. The most important artists who regularly produced lovers' eyes:
- Richard Cosway (1742–1821) - the pre-eminent English miniaturist of his day, court painter to the Prince of Wales
- Andrew Plimer (1763–1837) - known for particularly intense renderings of the eye
- George Engleheart (1750–1829) - produced more than 4,800 documented miniatures, among them several dozen eye images
- Anne Mee (1770–1851) - one of the few women miniaturists, specialising in female clients
The pieces are rarely signed - unlike full-format miniatures, lovers' eyes were often left unsigned by their painters in order to preserve anonymity. Attributions today are made on the basis of stylistic analysis and provenance.
Disappearance
With the Victorian change of taste from the 1830s onwards, the genre disappears. Three reasons:
- The Victorian order of mourning knew no cryptic, anonymous forms of jewellery; it was codified and publicly legible
- Photography made the eye miniature superfluous - a photograph showed the whole person
- Changed notions of propriety - open allusion to concealed love affairs became indecent in the Victorian middle classes
After 1840 hardly any originals are documented; the few later pieces (above all in France) are latecomers or imitations.
Lovers' eyes today
In modern memorial jewellery the genre plays no part - its iconographic language (the anonymous eye of the beloved) finds no contemporary successor. What does live on as a technical idea, however, is the cryptography of personal reference: a piece that only the wearer can read. In the twenty-first century the fingerprint takes on this role - to outside observers it too is a mere line drawing, to the wearer an unambiguous identification.
Collectors today turn to auctions; the largest collections are in the United States (Birmingham Museum of Art, Skier Collection), in England (V&A) and in private hands. Reproductions and imitations are not seriously traded - the fascination of the lover's eye lies in its original, biographically anchored authenticity.
Questions about this entry
- Why only the eye?
The eye is recognisable to the wearer and anonymous to everyone else. A full portrait would have identified the sitter at once - an eye keeps the secret. Lovers' eyes were frequently tokens of forbidden or socially delicate relationships (clandestine love, affairs, the early period of widowhood).
- What part does George IV play?
A decisive one. From about 1785 the future king wore a painted image of the eye of Maria Fitzherbert, the Catholic woman he had secretly married and who was never publicly acknowledged as his wife. The fashion became respectable out of this royal scandal - anyone wearing a lover's eye signalled an attachment that could not be made public.
- Are lovers' eyes always love tokens?
No. About a third of the surviving pieces are mourning jewellery - the eye of a recently deceased person, often with small pearl-set tears along the lower edge. In these cases sentimental and mourning jewellery merge - an overlap typical of the period.
- How many originals survive?
Estimates range between 800 and 1,200 worldwide. The largest collection (more than 200 pieces) is held by the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama. Originals are highly sought after by collectors today; well-preserved pieces fetch four- to five-figure prices at auction.
Further reading
- Lovers' Eyes: Eye Miniatures from the Skier Collection - Elle Shushan & Graham C. Boettcher (2012)
- Sentimental Jewellery - Shire Library - Ann Louise Luthi (2007)
- Birmingham Museum of Art - Lovers' Eyes Collection
- Victoria and Albert Museum - Eye Miniatures
Related entries
- Core conceptsSentimental Jewellery
Sentimental jewellery is the jewellery of the age of sensibility between 1760 and 1840 - pieces in which love, friendship and grief share the same imagery, and in which hair, miniature painting and personal inscriptions first become the load-bearing form.
- Core conceptsMemorial Jewellery
Memorial jewellery is jewellery that deliberately binds itself to one particular person - through an inscription, a photograph, hair, ashes or, the defining medium today, a digitally captured fingerprint.
- Core conceptsMourning Jewellery
Mourning jewellery is body adornment that signals a death, binds the memory of a deceased person, or does both at once - since the 17th century a jewellery type in its own right, with a material language of its own.
- Techniques & craftMiniature Painting on Ivory
Miniature painting on ivory was the leading technique of personal portrait jewellery in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries - the finest watercolour work on ivory plaques 1 to 5 cm across, set in gold mounts and worn as a pendant, brooch or bracelet.
- Techniques & craftSepia Hair Painting
Sepia hair painting combines two sentimental techniques: chopped human hair is worked with sepia ink into a pigment mixture and used as the medium for tiny mourning miniatures set beneath rock crystal.
- Techniques & craftHairwork
Hairwork is the collective term for all techniques in which human hair becomes the carrier material of a piece of jewellery - from a single lock beneath rock crystal to finely plaited hair weaving in the Victorian showpiece manner.
- Jewellery formsMourning Brooch
The mourning brooch is the central women's jewellery form of Victorian mourning wear - a brooch, often the size of a palm, pinned to dress, collar or veil, and today an almost exclusively historical field of collecting.
- Jewellery formsMourning Locket
The mourning locket is a pendant worn on a neck chain with an interior compartment - a concealed carrier of hair, photograph or inscription that keeps the memento close to the body and has been, from the eighteenth century to the present, the most important private form of mourning jewellery.
- PeriodsThe Georgian Era (1714–1837)
The Georgian era spans the reigns of the four kings George I to George IV and of William IV in Britain. In mourning jewellery it is the epoch in which sentimental jewellery was invented - sepia hair painting, the lover's eye, the miniature portrait on ivory, and the posy ring in transition to the memento mori ring.
- People & cultural historyGeorge IV (1762–1830)
George IV, Prince Regent from 1811 and King of England from 1820 to 1830, was a pronounced lover of sentimental jewellery and as such shaped the transitional phase in jewellery history between the Georgian and the Victorian mourning traditions - the lover's-eye fashion in particular is directly connected to his personal commission of 1785.