Lover's Eyes: Eye Miniatures from the Skier Collection

Until the early 2000s, little had been written about eye miniatures or Lover’s Eyes, and their short-lived popularity at the end of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries, when hand-painted portraits of single human eyes were set in jewelry, or created to memorialize a deceased loved one. This volume examines their role in the broader context of Georgian and early Victorian portrait miniatures; and looks in detail at the creation, and appeal, of these extraordinary objects. The collection of eye miniatures owned by Dr and Mrs. David A. Skier is one of the most complete such collections of this genre of miniature painting anywhere in existence. This volume features over 130 pieces from the Skier Collection, with 36 extraordinary newly acquired pieces, including two of the three known existing Lover’s Lips, and six examples of a delightful sub-category known as Flower Eyes. There are illustrated essays on forgeries and fakes of lovers’ eyes, on Flower Eyes, on the persistence of the eye image which continues the tradition of lovers’ eyes, and an essay on the eye miniatures created by Richard Cosway.