Eternal Gaze: The Enduring Allure of Lover’s Eye Jewellery

Few jewels are as intimate - or as misunderstood - as the tiny portrait miniatures known as Lover’s Eyes. Focused solely on the eye and set into lockets, brooches or rings, they have long been carried as tokens of love, loss or memory while concealing the full identity of the model. Today, the motif is being reinterpreted by contemporary jewellers, who draw on the same sentiments but use modern techniques to give the Lover’s Eye a new form.

These jewels, usually showing a single eye in watercolour or gouache upon ivory, then set under glass, are often linked to the romance between George, Prince of Wales (later King George IV) and his longtime companion Maria Fitzherbert, whom he married in secret in the late 18th century. Yet, as Philadelphia-based scholar and dealer Elle Shushan - a specialist in portrait miniatures and editor of the 2021 book Lover’s Eyes, based around the Skier Collection - explains, there was never truly an art form by that name.