Tag: Eye Miniatures

Lover’s Eyes: Eye Miniatures from the Skier Collection, ed. Elle Shushan, with contributions from Graham Boettcher and Stephen Lloyd (Lewes, United Kingdom: D. Giles, 2021). 280 pp., color illus. Miniature paintings in watercolor on ivory of a single eye were introduced in France and quickly became a fad in Great Britain in the late eighteenth century, later transferring, in a modest way, to the United States by century’s end. They came to be known as “lover’s eyes”—intensely private objects, usually of the giver’s eye presented to a loved one. The disembodied eye allowed the viewer to gaze upon the object of his or her affection, known only to them, and then, actively, the gaze was returned. Gold-link bracelet with a man’s eye in central glazed aperture, c. 1840. The recently published Lover’s Eyes: Eye Miniatures from the Skier Collection provides a revised and expanded version of the 2012 exhibition catalogue The Look of Love: Eye Miniatures from the Skier Collection, a show held at the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama. Nan and David Skier—he happens to be an eye surgeon—came upon an eye miniature at a Boston antiques show many years ago and became enamored, putting together one of the most important collections of these mesmerizing objects that have received little scholarly attention until recently. (The most comprehensive exploration of the subject is Hanneke Grootenboer’s Treasuring the Gaze: Intimate Vision in Late-Eighteenth-Century Eye Miniatures, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2012.) Gold brooch with a woman’s eye surrounded by band of diamonds, blue glass guilloche border, and white enamel outer border, 1890. Elle Shushan, who has devoted her career as a scholar and antiques dealer to the broad-based study of watercolor miniature portraits, serves as the volume’s editor, which includes six essays by her,