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 mementos, 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.

About the Author
Hanneke Grootenboer is a university lecturer in the history of art and a fellow and tutor at St Peter's College, University of Oxford. She is the author of The Rhetoric of Perspective: Realism and Illusionism in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still-Life Painting, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Reviews
"Hanneke Grootenboer has fixed her art-historical gaze on a largely overlooked category of visual representation: the late eighteenth-century miniature eye portrait. Precious gifts of love and mementos of loss, the tiny portraits of individual eyes open onto a cultural archive of affective behaviors and practices of seeing that would otherwise remain largely invisible. Treasuring the Gaze stands as a revelatory new chapter in the history of visuality and visual culture." (Lisa Saltzman, Bryn Mawr College)"



Book Information
ISBN 9780226309668
Author Hanneke Grootenboer
Format Hardback
Page Count 300
Imprint University of Chicago Press
Publisher The University of Chicago Press
Weight(grams) 992g
Dimensions(mm) 26mm * 19mm * 3mm