Treasuring the Gaze: Intimate Vision in Late Eighteenth-Century Eye Miniatures

By Hanneke Grootenboer

The end of the eighteenth century saw the start of a new craze in Europe: tiny portraits of single eyes that were exchanged by lovers or family members. Worn as brooches or pendants, these minuscule eyes served the same emotional need as more conventional mementoes, such as lockets containing a coil of a loved one’s hair. The fashion lasted only a few decades, and by the early 1800s eye miniatures had faded into oblivion. Unearthing these portraits in Treasuring the Gaze, Hanneke Grootenboer proposes that the rage for eye miniatures—and their abrupt disappearance—reveals a knot in the unfolding of the history of vision.
 
Drawing on Alois Riegl, Jean-Luc Nancy, Marcia Pointon, Melanie Klein, and others, Grootenboer unravels this knot, discovering previously unseen patterns of looking and strategies for showing. She shows that eye miniatures portray the subject’s gaze rather than his or her eye, making the recipient of the keepsake an exclusive beholder who is perpetually watched. These treasured portraits always return the looks they receive and, as such, they create a reciprocal mode of viewing that Grootenboer calls intimate vision. Recounting stories about eye miniatures—including the role one played in the scandalous affair of Mrs. Fitzherbert and the Prince of Wales, a portrait of the mesmerizing eye of Lord Byron, and the loss and longing incorporated in crying eye miniatures—Grootenboer shows that intimate vision brings the gaze of another deep into the heart of private experience.
 
With a host of fascinating imagery from this eccentric and mostly forgotten yet deeply private keepsake, Treasuring the Gaze provides new insights into the art of miniature painting and the genre of portraiture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Feb 5, 2013
• ISBN: 9780226309712

Book preview

HANNEKE GROOTENBOER is a university lecturer in the history of art at the University of Oxford. She is the author of The Rhetoric of Perspective: Realism and Illusion in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still-Life Painting.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2012 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2012.

Printed in China

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-30966–8 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-30971-2 (e-book)

ISBN-10: 0-226-30966-5 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-226-30971-1 (e-book)

Grootenboer, Hanneke.

Treasuring the gaze : intimate vision in late eighteenth-century eye miniatures / Hanneke Grootenboer.

pages : illustrations ; cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-30966-8 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ISBN 0-226-30966-5 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-30971-2 (e-book) — ISBN 0-226-30971-1 (e-book) 1. Eye in art—History—18th century. 2. Gaze in art—History—18th century. 3. Portrait miniatures—Europe—History—18th century. 4. Visual perception in art. 5. Intimacy (Psychology) in art. I. Title.

N821.E9G76 2012

757'.7—dc23

2012005109

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

TREASURING THE GAZE

Intimate Vision in Late Eighteenth-Century Eye Miniatures

HANNEKE GROOTENBOER

University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

Published with the support of the Getty Foundation and the support of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.

To Yasco and Viktor

The understanding, like the eye, whilst it makes us see and perceive all other things, takes no notice of itself; and it requires art and paints to set it at a distance and make it its own object.

—JOHN LOCKE, An Essay concerning Human Understanding

I have realized that the only happiness in this world is to observe, to spy, to watch, to scrutinize oneself and others, to be nothing but a slightly vitreous, somewhat bloodshot, unblinking eye.

—VLADIMIR NABOKOV, The Eye

Contents

List of Illustrations

Additional Photo Credits

Acknowledgments

Introduction: An Overlooked Episode in Vision’s History

1. Intimate Vision: The Portrait Miniature’s Structure of Address

2. Gazing Games: Eye Portraits and the Two Sexes of Sight

3. The Crying Image: The Withdrawal of the Gaze

4. Intimate as Extimate: The Gaze as Part-Object

5. The Face Becoming Eye: Portraiture’s Minimum

Conclusion: The Eye Portrait’s Afterlife

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Figure 1 Various eye miniatures, ca. 1800

Figure 2 Various eye miniatures, ca. 1800

Figure 3 Francis Wheatley, The Miniature, 1787–88

Figure 4 Lorenzo Lotto, Portrait of Andrea Odoni, 1527

Figure 5 Anonymous, Countess Erdin, ca. 1780

Figure 6 Richard Cosway, Eye Portrait of George, Prince of Wales, 1785

Figure 7 George Emanuel Opitz, Les champs des Tartars au Palais Royal, 1814

Figure 8 Buttons with generic eye portraits

Figure 9 Adolph Menzel, Illustration for Palladion, 1843

Figure 10 Anonymous, eye miniature, ca. 1800

Figure 11 Anonymous, Ocular Family Portrait of Queen Louisa of Prussia and Four of Her Children, 1802

Figure 12 Charlotte Jones, The Eye of Princess Charlotte, ca. 1817

Figure 13 Watch fob with eye portraits, ca. 1830

Figure 14 Sir William Ross, Eye Portrait of Feodora, Princess of Hohenlohe-Langenburg (1807–1872), 1843

Figure 15 Sir William Ross (attr.), Eye Portrait of the Duke d’Aumale and Eye Portrait of the Duchess d’Aumale, ca. 1855

Figure 16 Sir William Ross, The Duchess d’Aumale, ca. 1855

Figure 17 Richard Earlom after Charles Brandoin, Royal Academy Exhibition, 1771

Figure 18 Gerhard von Kügelgen, Eye Self Portrait, reverse of Portrait of Wilhelm Johann Zoege von Mantueffel, ca. 1800

Figure 19 Abolition medallion, ca. 1780

Figure 20 Daniel Chodowiecki, Das Auge der Vorsehung, ca. 1787

Figure 21 Declaration of the Rights of Man, 1789

Figure 22 J. E. Nilson, Juliana Maria, Queen of Denmark (1729–1796), ca. 1760

Figure 23 Robert Bowyer, George III, after 1789

Figure 24 Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, Elizabeth I, the Rainbow Portrait, ca. 1600–1603

Figure 25 Cesare Ripa, Reason of State, eighteenth century

Figure 26 Cesare Ripa, Jealousie, eighteenth century

Figure 27 Thomas Rowlandson, The Side Box at the Opera, 1785

Figure 28 P. A. Martini, after H. Rambert, The Royal Academy Exhibition of 1787, 1787

Figure 29 Various eyeglasses, ca. 1800

Figure 30 Anne Mee, Princess Sophia, ca. 1790

Figure 31 Curiosity, from Thomas Jeffreys, A collection of the dresses of different nations, antient and modern [sic], 1772

Figure 32 Cesare Ripa, Curiosity, eighteenth century

Figure 33 Mary and Matthew Darly, The Optic Curls, or the Obligeing Head Dress [sic], 1776–79

Figure 34 Hair jewelry, ca. 1840

Figure 35 Hair device medallion, ca. 1785

Figure 36 Memorial medallion, Not Lost but Gone Before, ca. 1790

Figure 37 Anonymous, Memorial for S. C. Washington, 1789

Figure 38 Memorial Ring in Memory of Cath Motley, ca. 1786

Figure 39 Richard Cosway, Margaret Cocks, 1787

Figure 40 J. G. Lavater, illustration from Essay sure la Physiognomie, 1786

Figure 41 Memorial medallion, Weep not it falls to rise again, ca. 1785

Figure 42 Anonymous, medallion with woman crying, ca. 1790

Figure 43 John Raphael Smith, Lotte at Werther’s Tomb, ca. 1783

Figure 44 Anonymous, medallion with mourning scene, ca. 1800

Figure 45 Anonymous, Death Mask of Queen Louisa of Prussia, 1810

Figure 46 Fredric Westin, Queen Josephine, ca. 1826

Figure 47 Giotto di Bondone, St. Francis Giving His Cloak to a Beggar, ca. 1305

Figure 48 Jacques-Louis David, Oath in the Tennis Court, 1791

Figure 49 Lorenzo Lotto, Portrait of a Man against a White Curtain, ca. 1506

Figure 50 Pierre-Louis Pierson, Scherzo di Follia, 1863–66

Figure 51 Pierre-Louis Pierson, Comtesse de Castiglione, 1863–66

Color Plates

Plate 1 Anonymous, eye miniature of a woman’s eye, ca. 1790

Plate 2 Anonymous, eye miniature of a man’s eye, ca. 1790

Plate 3 Anonymous, eye miniature, ca. 1800

Plate 4 Pompeo Batoni, Portrait of Sir Sampson Gideon with Unidentified Friend, 1767

Plate 5 Jean Baptiste Soyer, Unknown Woman, ca. 1790

Plate 6 Charles Hayter, A Boy, the Son of a Purser in the East India Company, ca. 1800

Plate 7 Charles Hayter, Unknown Woman and Two Children, ca. 1800

Plate 8 Thomas Hazlehurst, Portrait of a Man, ca. 1785

Plate 9 Thomas Hazlehurst, Portrait of Woman with Miniature of Her Husband, ca. 1785

Plate 10 Jean Raoux, Young Lady Reading a Letter, ca. 1710

Plate 11 Richard Cosway, Eye Portrait of Mrs. Fitzherbert, 1786

Plate 12 Anonymous, eye miniature, ca. 1790

Plate 13 Anonymous, eye miniature, ca. 1790

Plate 14 Richard Cosway, Margaret Cocks, Later Margaret Smith, 1787

Plate 15 Joseph Müller, Graf Deym von Stritetz (possibly in collaboration with Leonard Posch), Bust of Kaiser Ferdinand IV of Naples, ca. 1790

Plate 16 Joseph Müller, Graf Deym von Stritetz (possibly in collaboration with Leonard Posch), Bust of Emperor Leopold II, ca. 1790

Plate 17 Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Portrait of Queen Louisa of Prussia, 1801

Plate 18 Anonymous, hair bracelet with eye picture of Auguste Amalia, Duchess of Leuchtenberg, 1823

Plate 19 Anonymous, eye miniature, verse on reverse, ca. 1815

Plate 20 Anonymous, eye miniature, ca. 1790

Plate 21 Anonymous, eye miniature, possibly of Lord Byron, ca. 1810

Plate 22 Thomas Phillips, Portrait of Lord Byron in Albanian Costume, 1813–14

Plate 23 Richard Westall, Portrait of Lord Byron, 1813

Plate 24 Elizabeth Pigot, Eye Portrait of Lord Byron, 1807

Additional Photo Credits

Pls. 1, 2, 9, 20: © Christie’s Images Ltd/ARTOTHEK.

Pl. 3, fig. 50: Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY.

Pls. 6, 7, 13, fig. 28, 36, 39, 41, 44, 35, 34: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Pl. 12: Photograph © 2012 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Pl. 10, figs. 15, 47, 49: Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY.

Pls. 15, 16: © ÖNB Vienna + Signature.

Pl. 17: bpk, Berlin / Burg Hohenzollern, Hechingen, Germany / Art Resource, NY.

Pl. 18: © The Royal Court, Sweden. Photo Sven Nilsson.

Pls. 19, 21: Photographer: Roger-Viollet.

Pls. 22, 23: © National Portrait Gallery, London.

Figs. 3, 20: © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Figs. 4, 14, 16, 22, 23, 30: Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

Fig. 6: Photographic Survey, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London. Private collection.

Figs. 21, 46: Scala / Art Resource, NY.

Fig. 27: Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop, 1943.501. Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Fig. 37: Reproduction courtesy of Yale University Art Gallery. Promised Bequest of Davida Tenenbaum Deutsch and Alvin Deutsch, LL.B. 1958, in honor of Kathleen Luhrs.

Fig. 38: Reproduction courtesy of Robbins’ Roost Antiques.

Fig. 45: Reproduction courtesy of Laurence Hutton Collection of Life and Death Masks. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Princeton University Library.

Fig. 48: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

Acknowledgments

This book would probably have never been written were it not for the encouragement provided by Natasha Goldman when we viewed a display of eye miniatures together at the Philadelphia Museum of Art many years ago. I am grateful for the challenge she set me and for her loving support throughout the research and writing of this book.

St. Peter’s College and the Department of the History of Art at the University of Oxford have been a most welcoming and inspiring environment in which to complete this book, and I warmly thank my colleagues Craig Clunas, Geraldine Johnson, Gervase Rosser, and Alastair Wright, as well as our fantastic staff, Vicky Brown, Clare Hills-Nova, Christine Robertson, and Rachel Woodruff, for their continuous support.

At the University of Amsterdam, the presence of Mieke Bal was, as always, a great inspiration. For many stimulating conversations, I also want to thank colleagues, members of the staff, and my graduate students participating in the ASCA Theory Seminar, in particular Murat Aydemir, Deborah Cherry, Lucy Cotter, Jan Hein Hoogstad, Eloe Kingma, Begum Firat, Itay Sapir, and Jules Sturm. The participants in my seminar The Pensive Image, offered in 2006–8 at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, the Netherlands, generously shared their thoughts with me on a variety of topics discussed in this book; and I thank the academy’s then director, Koen Brams, and his staff, and my colleagues in the Theory Department, Dominiek Hoens and Katja Diefenbach, for making it all happen. A two-year Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Columbia University in New York provided the perfect intellectual climate in which to start this project, and I thank Jonathan Crary, Rosalind Krauss, and Keith Moxey for their inspiring comments on a presentation of this project in its earliest stage; Mellon fellows Stephen Pinson and Amy Powell for their stimulating conversation; and Douglas Fordham for his invaluable criticism on an earlier version of this text.

In addition, I am indebted to many individuals who have assisted me in one way or another in researching and writing this book over the past years, in particular Ernst van Alphen, Tim Barringer, Harry Berger Jr., Geoffrey C. Bond, Marilyn Brown, Norman Bryson, Eugene Chang, Douglas Crimp, Elisabeth Hill Boone, Katie Coombs, James Elkins, Jaś Elsner, Herschel Farbman, Kevin Hilliard, Michael Ann Holly, Sarah James, Tessa Lee, Nathalie Lemoine-Bouchard, Stephen Lloyd, Maria Loh, Bernd Pappe, Annette Peach, Kirsi Peltomäki, Marcia Pointon, Vanessa Remington, Rose Marie San Juan, Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, Kim Sloane, Garrett Stewart, Gérard Wajcman, Linda Whiteley, Abigail Williams, Claire Williams, and Christopher Wood.

Financial support has been provided in the form of short-term fellowships of the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art in London and the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, and research grants from the History Faculty at the University of Oxford. In addition, the Paul Mellon Centre in London awarded an Author and a Publisher Grant toward the publication of this book.

Susan Bielstein, Anthony Burton, and the team at the University of Chicago Press have been wonderful. I am deeply grateful for the constructive criticism I received from anonymous readers of the University of Chicago Press on an earlier version of this text, and of the Art Bulletin on an earlier version of the first part of chapter 2. Many thanks also to Jim Gibbons for his careful editing and to Allison Goudie for her cheerful assistance with image sourcing.

There are no words to express how much the love and support of my friends and family have been worth. I wish to thank my parents, Ruud and Mariëtte Grootenboer-Hooftman, for always being there, and my son Kees for the joy he brings. My warmest thanks to Roel and Kim Grootenboer, Juul Grootenboer and Arnold van Rooij, Willy and Dick Horsman, and Minke Horsman and Sebas Huisman for their help throughout, and to Hanneke Bolt, Rosemarijn van der Donk, Hiltje van Griensven, Susan Hahné, Indridi Indridason, Hanneke de Kloet, Nicolien Herblot, and Lucas Taris for decades of friendship so generously shared. This book cannot but be dedicated to Yasco Horsman and Viktor Horsting, whose gazes I treasure most.

Introduction

An Overlooked Episode in Vision’s History

Painting is not meant to be seen but to see.

—HENRI MALDINEY, Regard Parole Espace

Augengeschichte

In The Group Portraiture of Holland (1902), Alois Riegl argues that in the course of the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, group portraiture in the Netherlands grew increasingly dependent on the gaze of its beholder. While compositions of the early period show a strong internal coherence between sitters lined up in rows as if imprisoned by the frame, by the time of the Baroque the figures had liberated themselves by becoming more attentive to the viewer, vividly acknowledging his or her presence by opening up a process of intimate reflection that Riegl finds so typical of Dutch art.¹

Like his contemporary and rival Heinrich Wölfflin, Riegl attempted to write a history of art without names, or rather, a history of vision, and in The Group Portraiture of Holland he seems to have taken Wölfflin’s term Augengeschichte (history of the eye) literally. Closely examining changes in the rendering of the eyes of schutters and other members of professional groups, he observes the evolution of their gazes’ intention from empty eyes staring into nowhere into meaningful glances deliberately locking eyes with the spectator.² Riegl argues that the changing look of the portrayed has correspondingly transformed the space around them. For instance, the attentiveness of Rembrandt’s figures, most notably shown through the eyes of the Staalmeesters, is directed straight out toward the viewer so that the pathway created by their gaze shapes around them a new kind of pictorial space, which he terms free space. No longer developing alongside planes or diagonals that map out space within the painting, the gazes of the Staalmeesters plunge freely forward into a depth that stretches out in front of them in the direction of the viewer. Their careful tending toward the viewer ultimately leads Riegl to make the bold statement that the seventeenth-century group portrait is a type of painting that exists solely for the viewing subject (366).³ In contrast to, for instance, history painting, where figures interact within a greater narrative that prevents them from showing any interest in the beholder, for Riegl group portraiture is the category par excellence that through its attentiveness brings about a genuine encounter between the viewing subject and the sitters. This encounter is the painting’s aim, the Kunstwollen behind the evolution of the category as a whole.

Does Riegl really suggest that painting can grow dependent on the beholder to the extent that it exists only for him or her? Would this idea imply, as a consequence, that such pictures remain incomplete without a viewer? Does his statement thus mean that figures in the portraits are in fact waiting for the viewer to enter the scene, that they anticipate this moment of intimate reflection? Are they concerned to such an extent about their audience? For Riegl, sitters in group portraits are indeed concerned about their spectators, and the founding father of art history was certainly not the first to ascribe such a condition to painting. In his writings on aesthetics, Hegel had used a similar term when distinguishing between sculpture and painting.⁴ The philosopher wrote about how the freestanding statue is unconcerned about the spectator, who can see it from whatever angle he or she likes, in contrast to two-dimensional painting, in which, through point of view, the viewer is in it from the beginning (806).⁵ The artwork is thus concerned, Hegel asserts, because it does not exist for itself but for us.⁶ Following Hegel in this respect, Jean-Luc Nancy takes the sitter’s concern for its viewer even further in his theorization of the portrait. In his essay The Look of the Portrait (2000), he agrees with Hegel that the portrait is concerned as it looks out for us, its viewers; however, he shifts the emphasis of Hegel’s phrasing when he asserts that the exclusive concern of the portrait is the notion of the sitter as self. For Nancy, the sitter exists not only for itself but also as self. Taking Hegel, and for that matter Riegl, to an extreme, Nancy argues that this self can exist for itself only under the gaze of the viewer.

In French, the root of the word for gaze, regard, refers not to the act of seeing but to watchfulness, concern, and expectation. It is this meaning of the term gaze that we see reflected in the writings of these thinkers, and that I wish to further explore. Though Riegl’s formalist vocabulary did not allow for deep philosophical reflections, he was fully aware of the wide-ranging implications of portraiture’s attentiveness that Nancy would go on to explore. Struggling with the paradoxical nature of the portrait’s subject matter—an object that is in fact a subject looking out at its viewer who is also a subject—he wrote somewhat confusedly that for the viewing subject, there is apparently nothing more objective than the presence of a human being not oneself. . . . Objects exist only as a function of the subject (272). The question now arises whether we should understand the object as a function of the subject on a level of responsiveness, especially as the greatest concern of the portrait is us. We arrive here at a contradiction inherent in portraits (and, for that matter, in the philosophy of the subject) which Riegl observes but is not equipped to solve.

Unable to point to the heart of the problem he had stumbled upon, Riegl writes: The artists of Holland were the first to realize that the viewing subject can take mental control over all the objects in a painting by making them part of the viewing subject’s own consciousness (366). But evidently, as some of his analyses demonstrate, in portraits it is not so much the viewing subject who takes control over pictorial objects but rather the other way round: the portrayed clearly take the upper hand in guiding the intimate reflection of their viewer. Riegl’s analysis makes all too clear that it is the sitters’s calling that elicits such reflection. As a consequence, the dynamic between awaited subject and attentive object is bound to be a shifting relation. Can the attentiveness of the picture be completely subjective (Riegl’s phrasing) when sitters are still—as objects—the function of the viewing subject? Can a viewer be the subject of the painting? Can an object turn into a subject in its own right? Nancy in fact drives this point home when he states that in portraiture there is no such thing as an object that is placed before us; rather, the painting is ahead of us, so to speak, as we are the motivation behind its existence, the cause for its concern.

This study takes the portrait’s concern as starting point for an examination of a reciprocal model of vision rooted in the intricate—even intimate—clash between the viewer’s and the painting’s gazes. My hypothesis is that paintings look back at us, their viewers, and that the analysis of the picture’s look—in the double sense of outlook and image—is essential for our understanding of the operation of our field of vision in general, for our position as seeing subjects within that field, and moreover, for our relation with ourselves. As our gaze is invisible to ourselves (even when we look in the mirror) and its pathways leave no traces in the world, it is only in painting that its operation gets articulated: not as a mere reflection of what we see or how we see it but by producing us, as seeing subjects, against the spectacle of the world.

In the following chapters, I will ponder the implications and consequences of a genuine reciprocal model of vision in which the demarcation lines between subject and object are difficult to draw, in which, indeed, subject and object seem to be joined without ever having merged into one another. Via the gaze the relationship between subject and object seems to get closer to touch, and this was something that Riegl was deeply concerned about. As Henri Maldiney has pointed out, in his work Late Roman Art Industry Riegl had already developed not just the distinctive terms haptic and optic but also the conception of a viewer’s haptic gaze that would serve almost as a form of touch, directly linking the eye with the object.⁷ Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Lacan, and many others have pointed out that without a look looking back at us, we cannot see and hence do not exist as subjects. I suggest that it is only in the painting’s attentiveness, to use Riegl’s term, or in its look looking back at us, as Nancy suggests, that our gaze is able to turn not so much toward the object as toward itself.⁸ It is in this movement of the gaze that subject and object, the subject as object and the object as subject, become genuinely linked. Following Nancy in this regard, this study finds its foundation in the belief that something goes out of a sitter’s eyes, departing from it, which is a gaze. This gaze plunges into the visible world, creating a kind of space not unlike Riegl’s free space, triggering intimate reflection—a sphere of intimacy in which the viewer finds himself or herself alone.

Within the scope of this project, I am interested in this space resulting from an exchange of gazes, painted and real, which opens up a dimension of looking that has not yet been fully explored, and which I propose to call intimate vision. Having fallen outside the monumental perspectives brought about by ocularcentrism that have shaped our horizon over the past few decades, intimate vision denotes a mode of looking that has remained on the margins of our visual field ruled by voyeurism or surveillance. Though it may partly overlap with such notions, it is a very private kind of vision, secret even, not so much to the outside world as to the beholder as such. Therefore it falls outside the all-encompassing, objectifying power of linear perspective, which presupposes, among other things, the interchangeability of universalized beholders. Riegl’s notion of attentiveness is in many ways the opposite of painting as a worldview, and I would like to use the term intimate vision here as a counterweight, an antidote even, to the omnivoyance that linear perspective presupposes. In contrast to linear perspective, intimate vision does not open but closes a window onto the world; it does not show but shields; it does not allow full visual access but provides a shelter—indeed, it protects us from the wider field of visibilities. Ultimately, intimate vision provides an intimate space in which painting serves as the mise-en-scène for an encounter that allows us to fall back upon ourselves. One of the claims of this book is that painting’s concern is primarily to give us something, to offer us something like a gaze plunging deep into our space that allows us to escape from exposure. What it offers us by means of its look is a zone, a way of negotiating, of joining us with what we see, inside and outside, subject and object, what is ours and what is of the world. Maurice Blanchot has stated that the image is intimate because it makes our intimacy an exterior power: the image, far from leaving us outside of things and making us live in the mode of gratuitous fantasy, seems to surrender us profoundly to ourselves.⁹ I would add that it is through the look of the image, its intimate vision, that this surrender to ourselves occurs.

The Intimate Look of Eye Portraits

This book’s aim is to articulate intimate vision and demonstrate its operations through a study of eye portraits (plate 1). A short-lived subcategory of portrait miniatures, eye portraits are renderings in miniature of an individual’s single eye that were exchanged as gifts in Britain, and later in Europe and the United States, around 1800. As intensely private objects, eye portraits were keepsakes treasured in solitude and generally not brought into the public realm. Remarkably, not even scholarship has ever violated their privacy, as few publications on the topic exist.

An ambiguous object (part jewel and part miniature, not a real painting and not quite a portrait), eye portraits are excellent sites to explore the dimensions of intimate vision for a variety of reasons. First, the eye picture’s complete activity involved watching and looking back at its viewer. Second, if there is such a thing as a zoom in on a sitter’s attentive gaze, eye pictures show us the results of a radical cropping of such a gaze in miniature. Framed as an independent image (albeit in miniature), the eye portrait is therefore an intensification of the look: its subject matter is the sitter’s gaze. If we assume there is such a thing as a sitter’s concern for the viewer, watching out for us, nowhere in painting has this guarding been bracketed out so profoundly as in eye pictures. One-eyed vision is slightly disturbing if we think of Cyclopean gazing, the evil eye, or the power of God’s omnivoyance. However, different from these instances, the eye portrait’s monocular view seems to be concerned with a particular beholder. Indeed, as eye miniatures were produced as gifts (like most miniatures at the time), the staring eye was likely meant to see not a general audience but an exclusive beholder, and as such they form a great case study for exploring the encounter between painted and real gazes. Last, eye portraits have been overlooked and have thus remained undertheorized by art historical and visual studies. As a forgotten form of portrait painting, eye portraits have survived at the margins of art history, in bottom drawers of museum file cabinets and as collector’s items. They have hardly ever enjoyed scholarly attention. Apart from Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt’s informative chapter on eye pictures in her book Sehende Bilder: Die Geschichte des Augenmotivs seit dem 19. Jahrhundert (1992), in which she considers them as predecessors of the eye motif in symbolism and surrealism, only a handful of publications ever saw the light, most of these dating from before the 1940s and not