The Lover’s Eye – Secret Desire In Georgian England

“For she had eyes and chose me.”

― William Shakespeare, Othello

 

 

These miniature paintings of the ‘lover’s eye’ were made in painted watercolour on ivory in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Set in lockets, brooches, bracelets, rings, toothpick cases, and in the example above an 18th Century ladies travel urinal. The inscription for which says:

“Ha je te vois petit coquin.” (Ha! I see you, little rascal.)

 

 

These lovers’ eyes have a whiff of the erotic and the clandestine, giving a secret wink to a watching lover. Indeed, the fashion for them began in England when the then Prince and Wales and would-be future King George IV (12 August 1762 – 26 June 1830) was smitten with the twice-widowed Maria Anne Fitzherbert (26 July 1756 – 27 March 1837). To declare that she’d caught his eye he sent her a painting of his eye and a marriage proposal.

The couple married in a secret ceremony in 1785. The marriage was illegal. The Prince did not have the King’s approval and the heir was forbidden from marrying a Catholic without forfeiting his right to the throne. And so it was that Mrs Fitzherbert was fated to a life of deception as the Prince’s ‘mistress’. She kept up the pretence for almost a decade after George’s official marriage to his first cousin, Caroline of Brunswick, in 1795.

 

 

But true love outed and the Duke of Wellington (1 May 1769 – 14 September 1852)  testified to having seen a miniature of Fitzherbert around the king’s neck as he lay on his deathbed. The miniature, set in a diamond locket on a threadbare black ribbon, was buried with the king according to the terms of his will.

What else went on between them is moot. But George and Maria never went as far as that most famous Lover’s Eye, Beauty Revealed, a topless self-portrait Sarah Goodridge gave her lover, the politician Daniel Webster.

 

 

 

Via: Birmingham Museum of Art, and the private collection of David and Nan Skier.