The History of Lover's Eyes
Here's a little about this curious Georgian-Era fashion....
From 1785-1830, Lover’s Eyes were painted on small pieces of ivory, set in jewels, and worn as brooches pinned close to the heart as cherished talismans, clandestine proclamations of love, playful social guessing games, and the metonymic possession of the distant or departed beloved.
Lover’s Eyes seem to have originated in France. “On December 6, 1785,” writes Elle Shushan in Lover’s Eyes: Eye Miniatures from the Skier Collection, “the eccentric Lady Eleanor Butler recorded that a friend, recently returned from the Grand Tour, had brought back ‘an Eye, done at Paris and Set in a ring; a true French idea and a delightful idea which I admire more than I confess for its singular Beauty and Originality’” (p. 16).
It was in England, however, that the fad took off, thanks to the Prince Regent, the future King George IV, who was a notorious dandy and copied many of the latest fashions from France.
In 1784, he went to the opera and fell madly in love with the twice-widowed Maria Fitzherbert. According to British law he could not legally marry her because she was a Catholic, and she adamantly refused to be his mistress. She fled to Paris, but he continued to woo her (even feigning suicide), and on November 3, 1785, sent a letter with a postscript to say that he had sent her “a Parcel, and at ye. same time an eye, if you have not totally forgotten ye. whole countenance, I think ye. likeness will strike you.” They eventually married in secret and exchanged Lover’s Eyes.
The fact that she could only be his morganic (not technically legal) wife made the love story all the more devastatingly romantic. His love for her never waned, and in addition to the initial Lover’s Eye he had many more typical miniature portraits painted of her. In his will he requested “that my constant companion, the picture of my beloved wife, my Maria Fitzherbert may be inter’d with me suspended round my neck by a ribbon as I used to wear it when I lived &; placed right upon my heart” (Shushan, p. 34): it was indeed buried with him, and it is with him to this day. The identities of these three Lover's Eyes are thought to be George IV on the left and Maria Fitzherbert in the middle and on the right.
As a result of this illicit, high-profile relationship, the craze for Lover’s Eyes took off. Although for the most part the paintings (watercolors on ivory, and sometimes gouache on card) were set in pins, brooches, and lockets, they were also occasionally set in rings and jewelry clasps, as well as in and on snuffboxes, patch boxes, toothpick cases (shown), watch keys, book covers, dance programs, and even a coffee cup.
The lockets could be doubly interesting, since they frequently held the painted eye on one side and a braided or woven lock of hair on the other (below, a rare piece with the eye suspended from the hairwork): the Lover's Eye is a pictorial, the hairwork a physical synecdoche (part for the whole) of the lover. In these, the reliquary function of the eyes was heightened to an almost sacred devotion.
As the lightness of the Georgian Era gave way to the darkness of the post-Albert (1819-1861) Victorian Era, Lover’s Eyes gradually came to be less, on the whole, about passion, and more about friendship and family, insuperable distances, and holding on to some seemingly living part of a loved one even after death. Queen Victoria herself enjoyed Lover’s Eyes long after their trend had given way to the hair jewelry memento mori more common during the latter 19th century.
Lover’s Eyes are difficult to classify as artefacts: they’re jewelry and art, and as art they’re portraits, symbols, and abstracts. As such, although the renowned painter Richard Cosway (1742-1821) painted the Lover’s Eyes of King George and Maria Fitzherbert, he painted few others: artists considered them to be novelties beneath their renown. Most Lover’s Eyes were painted by anonymous miniature portrait painters who hopped on the trend, and some of these were employed by jewelers who supported in-house Lover’s Eye portraitists.
There are about 1000 Lover's Eyes remaining, and most come with a triple mystery.....Who was the painter? Who commissioned it? And who is it looking so soulfully at us through a little jeweled window and centuries of time?
