It all started in 1785 when Prince George of Wales was lovesick with Maria Anne Fitzherbert. Their story didn't really start well. Their courtship had been disastrous:
Royal laws forbade a Catholic widow like his beloved from becoming a monarch. To make matters worse, the upstanding Fitzherbert had fled the country after the prince’s first proposal, in an attempt to avoid controversy.
Nothing could stop the prince, though! On November 3rd, he begged again for her hand in marriage through a very passionate letter. In the letter, he also attached something.
“I send you a parcel,” George wrote in the letter’s postscript, “and I send you at the same time an Eye.”
This, my friends, started this trend wherein lovers would send jewelry containing a painting of their eye -- intently gazing.
Image Credit: Victoria and Albert Museum, London
No records document how Fitzherbert responded to the eye itself, but “it must have bolstered the prince’s marriage proposal,” as scholar Hanneke Grootenboer pointed out in her 2012 book Treasuring the Gaze: Intimate Vision in Late Eighteenth-Century Eye Miniatures. Soon after his letter, the star-crossed lovers wed in a covert ceremony. To cement the union, another disembodied eye was painted—this time in Fitzherbert’s likeness, nestled into a locket for the prince to treasure. No matter where his royal duties took him, George could open the jewel and receive his bride’s amorous gaze.
Image Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Prince of Wales and Fitzherbert weren’t the only ones exchanging eyes in 18th-century England. Eye miniatures, also known as lover’s eyes, cropped up across Britain around 1785 and were en vogue for shorter than half a century. As with the royal couple, most were commissioned as gifts expressing devotion between loved ones. Some, too, were painted in memory of the deceased. All were intimate and exceedingly precious: eyes painted on bits of ivory no bigger than a pinky nail, then set inside ruby-garlanded brooches, pearl-encrusted rings, or ornate golden charms meant to be tucked into pockets, or pinned close to the heart.
Image Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art