Georgian Lover’s Eyes

I made this series of four eyes after reading about the Georgian fashion for lover's eye miniatures — portraits of a single eye, painted so small they could be worn under a collar, and deliberately unrecognisable to anyone but the person who received them. The whole point was that a face gives you away and an eye does not.

They are painted in grisaille and enamel on antique mouthblown glass, built up over many firings, with the shading taken back out with a badger brush and a needle rather than laid on in mattes. It is the same removal technique I used on the Altenburg panel, but at a scale where a single lash is one stroke and there is no correcting it after the kiln. Leaded with H-profile came in the traditional way.

Every mark on this panel is made with grisaille and enamel, the same glass paints used in cathedral windows for the better part of a thousand years. The paint is fired into the glass in a kiln at over 600°C, so the colour becomes part of the glass itself and will not fade, scratch or lift — not in your lifetime, and not in your grandchildren's. The eye is built up in layers, shading is added and paint is removed using a badger- or hog-hair brush, hake or sable paint brushes, stipplers, needles, sticks and porcupine quills, which is how the soft gradation around the lid is achieved. It takes many hours across many days to complete one eye.

The glass itself is antique, mouth-blown and full of the bubbles, ripples and striations that machine glass simply does not have. It is leaded with H-profile came in the traditional way, soldered at every joint and sealed with putty, then finished with copper loops so it can hang in a window or sit on a stand.