Featured on PDR in the collection The Lens of Desire: Eye Miniatures (ca. 1790–1810)

Miniatures are a subset of portrait paintings, and within miniatures is yet another, more obscure, subset: paintings of a left eye, or a right eye, amid little else. Dubbed “lovers’ eyes” by a canny antiques dealer, nearly all miniature eye portraits were painted with watercolor on ivory in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. They were set in rings, lockets, brooches, toothpick cases, and the like, and gifted between lovers. Luminous, exquisite, and fragile (a drop of water might wash away the tiny brushstrokes), lovers’ eyes did not mean, as it might seem, “I have my eye on you”, but rather, “You have my heart, and here’s my eye to prove it”.