From the collection of Dr. and Mrs. David A. Skier of Birmingham AL
After seeing our installation at the Portrait Society show, Debra Brehmer mentioned that there is a long history of eye portraiture. An exhibition at the Birmingham Museum of Art further informs on the portrait phenomenon of....“lover’s eyes,” hand-painted miniatures of single human eyes set in jewelry and given as tokens of affection or remembrance. In 1785, when the Prince of Wales secretly proposed to Mrs. Maria Fitzherbert with a miniature of his own eye, he inspired an aristocratic fad for exchanging eye portraits mounted in a wide variety of settings including brooches, rings, lockets, and toothpick cases.
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