Treasuring the Gaze: Intimate Vision in Late Eighteenth-Century Eye Miniatures 9780226309712

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treasuring the gaze

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.

treasu ri ng th e ga ze Intimate Vision in Late Eighteenth-Century Eye Miniatures

ha n n e ke g r o ote nboer 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 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12   1 2 3 4 5 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 0-226-309665 (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).

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  ix



Additional Photo Credits  xiii

Acknowledgments  xv

Introduction:  An Overlooked Episode in Vision’s History  1

1

Intimate Vision:  The Portrait Miniature’s Structure of Address  17

2

Gazing Games:  Eye Portraits and the Two Sexes of Sight  45

3

The Crying Image:  The Withdrawal of the Gaze  89

4

Intimate as Extimate:  The Gaze as Part-Object  125

5

The Face Becoming Eye:  Portraiture’s Minimum  161



Conclusion:  The Eye Portrait’s Afterlife  175

Notes  181 Bibliography  199 Index  211

Illustrations

Figure 1

Various eye miniatures, ca. 1800  19

Figure 2

Various eye miniatures, ca. 1800  20

Figure 3

Francis Wheatley, The Miniature, 1787–88  24

Figure 4

Lorenzo Lotto, Portrait of Andrea Odoni, 1527  29

Figure 5

Anonymous, Countess Erdin, ca. 1780  31

Figure 6

Richard Cosway, Eye Portrait of George, Prince of Wales, 1785  46

Figure 7

George Emanuel Opitz, Les champs des Tartars au Palais Royal, 1814  50

Figure 8

Buttons with generic eye portraits  51

Figure 9

Adolph Menzel, Illustration for Palladion, 1843  52

Figure 10 Anonymous, eye miniature, ca. 1800  53 Figure 11 Anonymous, Ocular Family Portrait of Queen Louisa of Prussia and Four of Her Children, 1802  54 Figure 12 Charlotte Jones, The Eye of Princess Charlotte, ca. 1817  55 Figure 13 Watch fob with eye portraits, ca. 1830  56

ix

Figure 14 Sir William Ross, Eye Portrait of Feodora, Princess of HohenloheLangenburg (1807–1872), 1843  57 Figure 15 Sir William Ross (attr.), Eye Portrait of the Duke d’Aumale and Eye Portrait of the Duchess d’Aumale, ca. 1855  58 Figure 16 Sir William Ross, The Duchess d’Aumale, ca. 1855  58 Figure 17 Richard Earlom after Charles Brandoin, Royal Academy Exhibition, 1771  60 Figure 18 Gerhard von Kügelgen, Eye Self Portrait, reverse of Portrait of Wilhelm Johann Zoege von Mantueffel, ca. 1800  61 Figure 19 Abolition medallion, ca. 1780  63 Figure 20 Daniel Chodowiecki, Das Auge der Vorsehung, ca. 1787  64 Figure 21 Declaration of the Rights of Man, 1789  64 Figure 22 J. E. Nilson, Juliana Maria, Queen of Denmark (1729–1796), ca. 1760  65 Figure 23 Robert Bowyer, George III, after 1789  66 Figure 24 Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, Elizabeth I, the Rainbow Portrait, ca. 1600–1603  67 Figure 25 Cesare Ripa, “Reason of State,” eighteenth century  68 Figure 26 Cesare Ripa, “Jealousie,” eighteenth century  68 Figure 27 Thomas Rowlandson, The Side Box at the Opera, 1785  73 Figure 28 P. A. Martini, after H. Rambert, The Royal Academy Exhibition of 1787, 1787  76 Figure 29 Various eyeglasses, ca. 1800  76 Figure 30 Anne Mee, Princess Sophia, ca. 1790  77 Figure 31 “Curiosity,” from Thomas Jeffreys, A collection of the dresses of different nations, antient and modern [sic], 1772  79 Figure 32 Cesare Ripa, “Curiosity,” eighteenth century  79 Figure 33 Mary and Matthew Darly, The Optic Curls, or the Obligeing Head Dress [sic], 1776–79  83 Figure 34 Hair jewelry, ca. 1840  93 Figure 35 Hair device medallion, ca. 1785  95 Figure 36 Memorial medallion, “Not Lost but Gone Before,” ca. 1790  99 Figure 37 Anonymous, Memorial for S. C. Washington, 1789  100 Figure 38

Memorial Ring in Memory of Cath Motley, ca. 1786  100

Figure 39 Richard Cosway, Margaret Cocks, 1787  102 Figure 40 J. G. Lavater, illustration from Essay sure la Physiognomie, 1786  103 Figure 41 Memorial medallion, “Weep not it falls to rise again,” ca. 1785  105 Figure 42 Anonymous, medallion with woman crying, ca. 1790  107 Figure 43 John Raphael Smith, Lotte at Werther’s Tomb, ca. 1783  110 Figure 44 Anonymous, medallion with mourning scene, ca. 1800  111 Figure 45 Anonymous, Death Mask of Queen Louisa of Prussia, 1810  118 Figure 46 Fredric Westin, Queen Josephine, ca. 1826  127

x ¦ list of illustrations

Figure 47 Giotto di Bondone, St. Francis Giving His Cloak to a Beggar, ca. 1305  145 Figure 48 Jacques-Louis David, Oath in the Tennis Court, 1791  156 Figure 49 Lorenzo Lotto, Portrait of a Man against a White Curtain, ca. 1506  170 Figure 50 Pierre-Louis Pierson, Scherzo di Follia, 1863–66  176 Figure 51 Pierre-Louis Pierson, Comtesse de Castiglione, 1863–66  178

Color plates appear after p. 124. 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

list of illustrations ¦ xi

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. xiii

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, xv

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 twoyear 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 xvi ¦ acknowledgments

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.

acknowledgments ¦ xvii

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 1

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 2 ¦ introduction

“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 wideranging 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. an overlooked episode in vision’s history ¦ 3

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 re4 ¦ introduction

mained 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. an overlooked episode in vision’s history ¦ 5

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 running more than a few pages. In light of the immense interest in theories of looking and the steady stream of publications on vision and the gaze that has dominated the humanities over the past three or four decades, the lack of studies on eye portraits represents a striking oversight, to say the least. The aim of this study is to make this oversight productive. By closely following Riegl and Wölfflin, with this book I intend to write a chapter of the Augengeschichte they wished to trace by taking this term to the letter even more than I claim Riegl did.10 As forgotten artifacts, these peculiar minipaintings of single eyes possess the rare effect of confronting us, as art historians, with an unfamiliar way of dealing with vision. The sudden vogue for tiny portraits of single eyes, and their later oblivion, may point to a dense moment in the unfolding of vision’s history that has vanished from our view, a knot that I attempt to unravel in order to unearth modes of looking and strategies for showing that have remained unseen. My premise is that eye pictures stand at the foundation of intimate vision, a mode of looking that is reciprocal in the sense that it always returns the look it gets.11 This study thus deals with 6 ¦ introduction

the consequences of this model for traditional subject-object relationships and the implications for the theory of the image it brings about. This knot in vision’s history will be unraveled by combining historical and theoretical approaches. By placing eye portraits in the larger historical context of the production of jewel-like souvenirs as part of the cult of sentimentality, I will study their function and meaning in a late-eighteenth-century visual culture obsessed with seeing, being seen, and seeing without being seen. The eye portrait’s potential to open up new pathways of thought about vision’s enigma will be expanded upon through a focus on the image of the eye as such, its usage and handling, as much as on the kind of space it evokes. Much like Riegl, for whom sitters’ forward stare into depth generated free space from within the portrait’s realm, I examine the intimate space these trinkets open up by their demanding look. To that end, this book contributes to ongoing debates on the theory of the image, in particular portraiture, and the not-yet-fully-explored notion of the intimate, as well as the implications for images that look back for our understanding of the subject-object relationship in art. More specifically, because it presents a chapter of the history of vision, this book is about fascination, in its double meaning as the fixation of the gaze on an image and the attraction of a gaze by an image. It is the “look” of both beholder and image that glues these two meanings together, creating a realm where vision and image join yet do not merge, and it is this vision of painting that this book explores.

The Miniature Until the early 1990s, the general literature on portrait miniatures largely consisted of inventories and historical overviews. Written by authors such as George C. Williamson, Daphne Foskett, and Graham Reynolds, many of whom were collectors and connoisseurs of miniatures themselves, these publications, though extremely helpful, are largely descriptive efforts with little to say regarding the miniature’s role in the larger visual culture in which it functioned. Only sporadically are eye portraits mentioned in these publications, and often not at all favorably as “fishy” eyes. In recent decades, however, portrait miniatures have increasingly enjoyed scholarly attention and stimulated theoretical reflection. Susan Stewart’s famous contemplation of desire and possession in On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir and the Collection (1993) and Patricia Fumerton’s imaginative analysis of ornaments in English court culture, Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social an overlooked episode in vision’s history ¦ 7

Ornament (1991), include compelling examinations of the significance of portrait miniatures for the understanding of the individual’s relation to the surrounding social and public spheres. Their work has paved the way for a series of fresh perspectives on miniature art, replacing the largely descriptive handbooks on portrait miniatures that the limited literature had encompassed. For instance, The Portrait Miniature in England (1998) by Katherine Coombs discusses portrait miniatures in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London by placing them against the backdrop of the literature and art theory of their time. As her readings demonstrate, in its heyday the portrait miniature was significantly more valued than has been generally been understood. In conjunction with an exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery, Robin Jaffee Frank has investigated the use and meaning of American portrait miniatures and other miniature image-jewels in rituals of mourning in her Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures (2000). Ann Sumner and Richard Walker brought the miniature to life in Secret Passion to Noble Fashion: The World of the Portrait Miniature (1999), and Stephen Lloyd and Kim Sloane have unearthed new documentation on portrait miniatures as specifically intimate pictures in their catalog for an exhibition in the British Museum titled The Intimate Portrait: Drawings, Miniatures and Pastels from Ramsay to Lawrence (2009). A unique endeavor in the literature on portrait miniatures is the work of Marcia Pointon. Pointon, like Fumerton, approaches miniatures from a largely anthropological perspective by starting to ask how exactly these portrait-objects, as she calls them, were handled and used in proximity to the body. Her focus is on the meaning and function of these objects for the subjectivity of the people directly involved with them. Invoking psychoanalytical theories of play by D. W. Winnicott, Pointon places portrait miniatures firmly in a framework of late-eighteenth-century networks of looking, in which strategies of seeing and showing were played out by those commissioning such items or receiving them as gifts from loved ones. Her publications on jewelry and wigs, monumental in their own right, further reveal the small-scale personal history that these items encompass. These innovative developments demonstrate a rising interest in the portrait miniature as a significant and intriguing part of the history of portraiture. In light of these changes, we may say that the eye picture’s initial neglect is now an advantage in the sense that we may recognize in the uncanny look of the wide-open yet sightless eye a reason that scholarship has shied away from these odd items. Having retained their slightly disturbing qualities, they possess great potential to inspire theoretical innovation and critical reflection. Although having miniature proportions—or precisely 8 ¦ introduction

because of having such proportions—the staring gaze can confront us in an unexpected and unprecedented manner. Eye portraits offer a way out of the theoretical impasse and interpretative exhaustion of virtually wornout concepts such as voyeurism, gaze, or scopic regime. The peculiarity of the quite unsettling, staring eye sends us a kind of invitation, which, if accepted, may be transformed into a confrontation, a revelation even, to the extent that the thing we look at turns us, its viewers, into a sight. We may wonder what these tiny images intend to watch, or what it is that they want, to use W. J. T. Mitchell’s phrase.12 If these eye portraits communicate something, what can it be? And what part of the communication of these long-forgotten and overlooked stares can potentially be a valuable contribution to current debates on vision? One way to figure out what these images want is to let the objects themselves take the lead in this investigation. In many ways, the gaze always desires something other than what it is given, and this is one of the reasons for my proposal to follow the eye picture’s gaze rather than our own. If the gaze wishes to “speak,” as Jean Starobinski suggests, completing Goethe’s statement that the hand wants to see and the eye wants to caress, we should listen carefully to what it tells us.13 Therefore, in this study eye portraits are considered theoretical objects in Mieke Bal’s sense of the term: objects engaging us in critical reflection. Going beyond Louis Marin’s and Hubert Damisch’s (and Giovanni Careri’s) notion of a theoretical object as an artwork around which theoretical discourse continues to be generated (for instance Velázquez’s Las Meninas, or early Renaissance Annunciation paintings), Bal understands the term to encompass works of art that are capable of articulating theoretical thought by deploying their medium as such. Approaching an artifact as a theoretical object is for Bal not so much a method as an attitude, a way of looking to art rather than at it, in order to understand what it does as much as what it is.14 This book aims to contribute to the theory of the image by looking to eye portraits to see what they offer us, what they may articulate about vision and about their own medium as portraits.

The Intimate Let me explain further my use of the term intimate here. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), Jürgen Habermas famously defines intimacy as a quality related to family life and the complex social architecture of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century bourgeois home. He argues that intimacy as a political and social construct results from the an overlooked episode in vision’s history ¦ 9

newborn division between the public and the private which runs right through the bourgeois home. The public character of the earlier parlor had made way for intricate subdivisions of living room, drawing room, and salon, each designed specifically for the public or private sphere.15 Individuals could step from the intimacy of family life in the living room straight into the public zone of the salon, which could connect with the outside world only through its relation to the drawing room. The public, private, and intimate literally border on one another in the bourgeois residence, and Habermas is indeed more interested in the intertwining of the various spheres than in the ways they remain distinct from each other. Following Kant to this extent, who claims that the public sphere developed through a growth in publications, Habermas writes that the practices of popular (male) public coffee houses and salons were joined by those of letter writing, whereby “subjectivity originating in the interiority of the family, by communicating with itself, attained clarity about itself.”16 Letters created a virtually theatrical, audience-oriented privacy for writers who confirmed each other’s subjectivity as it emerged from the intimacy of the home by communicating in the public sphere. This development becomes even more apparent with the rise of the epistolary novel, whose protagonists display inner lives oriented toward a public audience to the extent that we see, Habermas argues, the problems of private existence absorbed to a certain degree by the public sphere.17 Habermas recognizes that the founding of an intimate space in the home corresponds with the urge to communicate details of the inner self. The use of the term intimacy in this book draws on Habermas’s ideas to the extent that I see, with Pointon, an analogy between letters and miniatures (discussed in chapter 1 in terms of their particular structure of address). Unlike Habermas, who firmly locates the world of men of letters in the public sphere and sees subjectivity as originating in the home and subsequently communicated via letters into the public sphere, my examination of this analogy focuses on spaces of relative solitude in which miniatures and letters are kept and viewed, and the ways in which the opening and closing of such spaces create a kind of a retreat, fostering an intimacy with the self from which subjectivity is born. In that sense, my understanding of intimacy is closer to that of Hannah Arendt, who defines it as a way of sheltering the self from the social realm. Differing from Habermas’s understanding of the house that shows the intertwining of public and private to be protective of bourgeois freedom, Arendt observes how the rise of the social sphere abolished distinctions between the public and the private by dissolving the latter. For one to be deprived of others (the original meaning of “privacy”), intimacy is the 10 ¦ introduction

only site to which one can withdraw.18 Following Rousseau’s preoccupation with self and inner space in his Confessions, and his idea that both the intimate and the social are subjective modes of human existence, Arendt understands intimacy as an innermost region without a place: “The intimacy of the heart, unlike the private household, has no objective tangible place in the world,” she writes.19 The distinction between public and private in fact equals the distinction between things that should be shown and things that should be hidden. What is intimate should thus remain hidden from the public eye, that is, it should not be published. The writings of Rousseau and the Romantics (who, according to Arendt, discovered intimacy) should thus be seen as a rebellious reaction against the demands of the social sphere. Due to the dissolution of the private into the social sphere, and the corresponding elimination of the subject from it, intimacy has become both a necessity and an unreliable substitute. Indeed, the four walls of one’s own room are very likely to be the only reliable hiding place from being seen and being heard.20 Following Arendt in her assertion that intimacy is an innermost region without a place (echoing Montaigne’s famous notion of the “backroom” in his head to which he retires when fatigued from the demands of his family), Julia Kristeva argues that it is space that falls outside normal spatial extension, and she suggests we see the intimate as a temporality.21 Attempting to track down a history of intimacy, she recognizes, contrary to Arendt, that Freud was the first articulate explorer of intimacy, and she sees two major revolutions of intimacy in the work of psychoanalysis and the writings of Augustine. Ultimately, she claims that for psychoanalysis, what is most intimate is simultaneously most strange, a conception that recalls Lacan’s notion of extimacy.22 Adam Phillips and Leo Bersani would probably share Kristeva’s view of Freud as the major explorer of intimacy. In their jointly written book Intimacies (2008), they define psychoanalysis as an intimate conversation by two people who agree not to have sex. Exploring this definition, Bersani and Phillips pursue new forms of intimacy to arrive at what they call “impersonal narcissism,” a kind of love that is modeled after the dialogue, or rather after the attuning between mother and child. Based on both Socrates and Freud, the authors elaborate on intimacy as an exchange between lover and beloved based on a reciprocal attentiveness to the other’s becoming. Impersonal intimacy does not reveal a truth about the self but is a process of becoming, whereby the subject’s wish to know the other’s potential self evolves in sharing a type of being-as-becoming. In her introduction to the special issue of Critical Inquiry (1998) on the topic of intian overlooked episode in vision’s history ¦ 11

macy, Lauren Berlant has taken a slightly different route, considering the ways in which public institutions have used issues of intimate life to normalize particular forms of knowledge. She focuses on the intimate as it has become inseparable from stories, for instance, of citizenship, capitalism, and politics.23 Within the scope of this study, my use of the term intimacy is rooted in psychoanalysis, and to a certain extent takes the mother-child attunement discussed by Bersani and Phillips as its model. Obviously, the term will be used to map out the shifting borders between the realms of the public, private, and intimate in the later eighteenth century. However, unlike Berlant or Bersani and Phillips, and more in line with Arendt, this book focuses on the intimate as a stage that results less from an exchange between people vis-à-vis their larger society, and more as a space where the self can take shelter from exposure to establish a relation with itself. My framework for the use of the term is anchored in Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space: A Classic Look at How We Experience Intimate Places (1957),24 which maps out a topology of private places. Bachelard examines domestic spaces such as attics and cellars, as well as baskets, boxes, nests, and even shells, regarding these as intimate places where we find solitude. Such places have become models for our notion of intimacy, he argues, and as such are storage spaces for memories as well as grounds for daydreams and thoughts. Bachelard’s conception of intimate places forms the basis for my notion of intimate vision as a kind of closed circuit evoked by an eye miniature that, by closing off the world, opens up an interiority as a deep-seated realm within the self. In his topoanalysis, Bachelard observes strong connections among architecture, furniture, and smaller containers—all spaces that, when opened, cancel out the exterior world. A particular focus is on miniature items such as toys or dollhouses and the intimacy they bring forth when a viewer gains purely visual access to their tiny realms. This book will follow Bachelard’s topoanalysis by demonstrating how, in line with his examples of the attic and the drawer, other containers like lockets, envelopes, or, for that matter, eyelids can be opened to release a free space that is deeply private. Such realms of intimacy can be defined only as that which escapes the gaze of others, as a space accessible and visible only to us. Intimacy is thus a refuge from the visible world within a space where one may be seen but is not visible to the eyes of the world. This book takes painting in general, and (eye) miniature portraits in particular, as the mise-en-scène for the creation of the space of intimate vision. Therefore, I do not credit Rousseau or the Romantics with the discovery of intimacy, as Arendt suggests, or Freud or Augustine, as proposed 12 ¦ introduction

by Kristeva and Bersani and Phillips. Rather, I follow Gérard Wajcman, who has stated that the birth of the intimate coincided with the birth of the oil painting (“tableau”) and thus initiated the birth of the subject, who, as spectator, could now fully separate himself or herself from the objects in the world. In his Fenêtre: Chroniques du regard et de l’intime (2004)25 he combines, in the context of Lacanian psychoanalysis, ideas explored by Arendt and Bachelard on the deep-seated notion of interiority as being located in the world, yet without having a proper place. Inspired by Blanchot’s insight that a certain kind of intimacy with ourselves is brought about by the image, as it “speaks to us, and it seems to speak intimately to us about ourselves,” he develops his argument that in painting we may find a kind of space in which we can be alone. In line with Lacan’s understanding of the so-called Apollonian effect of painting as a way of “taming” the Gaze with a capital G, Wajcman argues that this kind of intimacy with the self can be found only in front of paintings, as they are capable of shielding us from the Gaze. Though pretending to be windows opening onto the world, paintings effectively close their shutters on the world by creating a space where one is no longer exposed as a visibility. The intimate is that which is subtracted from the Gaze, a space blocked off by the painting where no other visibilities are allowed. Intimacy can thus only be defined, Wajcman insists, in accordance with the gaze. The sexual connotations of the notion of an indiscreet, peeping gaze will be pushed aside to ensure a more precise analysis of the gaze’s capacity to overcome distinctions between various signs within the image, as well as the border separating the viewer as subject from the object viewed. Ultimately, inspired by Bachelard’s correspondences between the house, the wardrobe, and the box or chest, this book argues for seeking a similar link defined by dialectics of inside and outside, opening and closing, between painting and the gaze, between a tableau as a window and the eye, or rather the pupil, as a kind of a hole through which the gaze departs. To conclude, a few words on the attention given to the anecdotal nature of the materials I discuss in this work. Following Stewart’s notion that the miniature provides a life within a life, my use of microhistory as recounted by letters, jewels, and other keepsakes meaningful only to the individuals who possess them seems fitting for a study of eye portraits. Following Harry Berger in this regard, I understand the notion of anecdote in its original meaning of “things not given out” in the public sphere. Marking out a zone of intimacy in which the public and the private are in constant fluctuation, letters, portrait miniatures, eye pictures, and other types of sentimental jewelry, as much as the places where these were kept an overlooked episode in vision’s history ¦ 13

or worn (under the necklines of dresses, in pockets and jewel or writing boxes, etc.), are anecdotal in precisely Berger’s sense. Bachelard bases his typoanalysis of intimate places solely on poetry, whose language he considers to be an intense form of life. For him, poems, or what he calls the poetic image, may serve as an epistemological obstacle that interrupts existing systems of knowledge in order to open up new pathways for thought. My examination of eye portraits, and of other paraphernalia such as hair bracelets, quizzing glasses, sentimental rhymes, and inscriptions on jewels, should be understood in this vein as clusters of microhistory, as epistemological obstacles that, if we allow them to take the lead, may direct us to alternative routes of seeing and thinking. Except for the first chapter, which explains the eighteenth-century infrastructure of gift exchange by mapping out spaces and places where letters and portrait miniatures were treasured, each of the following chapters revolves around a particular eye portrait as a point of departure so as to untangle a different part of the knot of vision. The chapters’ running theme is a gradual breaking down of the traditional subject-object relation, or, rather, the overcoming of the distance between them, for instance between subject and object of sight (in chapter 2), the living and the dead (in chapter 3), the body and the world (in chapter 4), and the sitter and the beholder (in chapter 5). This book ultimately argues that oppositions such as interior and exterior, inside and outside, private and intimate running along this traditional subject-object relation are in fact joint realms, connected at each other’s core level, without ever merging. In each chapter, an attempt will be made to demonstrate the ways in which eye portraits, showing the departure of the gaze, open up channels (of vision, of seeing) that lead to a further understanding as to how opposite terms are joined. The first chapter, “Intimate Vision: The Portrait Miniature’s Structure of Address,” investigates the ever-fluctuating border separating and joining public and private spheres. Through a discussion of the similarities of transportation, preservation, and enunciation of letters and miniatures, the role of the intimate as defining these separating lines will be examined. Among other things, the co-location of architecture, furniture, and containers will be analyzed so we may understand the ways in which these spaces shape our notion of intimacy. The work of Stewart and Bachelard will form the basis for demonstrating how portrait miniatures and eye pictures, through their structure of address, evoke a particular intimacy that can be described as a space within a space, or a life within a life, where intimate vision—the exclusive exchange of painted and real gazes—occurs. 14 ¦ introduction

Against this general map of gift economy and exchange of gazes, the second chapter, “Gazing Games: Eye Portraits and the Two Sexes of Sight,” examines various specific tendencies that can be observed within this network. With an eye miniature of Mrs. Fitzherbert, the mistress of the prince of Wales (long to be thought the first of its kind), as a point of departure, strategies of seeing and showing of a visual culture obsessed with visibility will be outlined as the mise-en-scène in which the eye portrait emerged. Against the backdrop of the proliferating secularization of the iconography of the eye during the Enlightenment, as well as a process of domestication or “taming” of a curious, peeping, and gendered gaze, it will be argued that eye pictures are symptomatic of a culture of seeing, as they are both agent and representation of vision. This chapter includes a short overview of the literature on eye portraits. Whereas the second chapter focuses on eye portraits of lovers, the third chapter, “The Crying Image: The Withdrawal of the Gaze,” concentrates on so-called weeping eye portraits depicting eyes of deceased loved ones. The eye of a certain Thomas Purvis will be the starting point for interpreting the attached crystals or diamonds in terms of the rhetoric of tears apparent in the cult of sentimentality. Comparing Purvis’s crying eye to other mourning jewels containing hair or including mottos, the question of the specific enunciation or demand of the tears will be answered in light of the notion of apostrophe and prosopopoeia as messages voiced by the dead. Particular attention will be paid to the idea of the dead gaze, and the eye portrait’s relation to the empty stare of death masks and the lively gaze of wax busts, in light of Heidegger’s and Nancy’s notion of the withdrawal of the gaze and Julius von Schlosser’s thoughts on wax portraiture. Within a (Kleinian) psychoanalytic framework, the fourth chapter, titled “Intimate as Extimate: The Gaze as Part-Object,” discusses the eye portrait in terms of projection and introjection as a receiver as much as a transmitter of vision. The eye portrait of Auguste Amalia, mother of Josephine who later became a queen of Sweden, will be used as a basis for elaborating on mother-child attunements in relation to the gaze as part-object. The gaze as part-object will then be applied in order to further investigate the complexities of painting’s relation to the gaze. Merging Foucauldian with Lacanian paradigms, a rereading of Norman Bryson’s classic Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (1986) in light of a discussion of Gérard Wajcman’s Fenêtre: Chroniques du regard et de l’intime will lead me to formulate the eye portrait’s relation to (the history of) painting as extimate, as the point of view that has to—always—remain suppressed in order to allow the image to appear. an overlooked episode in vision’s history ¦ 15

Following on the findings of the previous chapters, “The Face Becoming Eye: Portraiture’s Minimum” examines the consequences and implications of eye portraits for the understanding of portraiture in general. Building on the case of an eye portrait allegedly of Lord Byron, the question of the eye miniature’s status as portrait is raised in terms of what constitutes the portrait of a subject. Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay “The Look of the Portrait” will be at the basis for a final, phenomenological reflection on how the painted gaze relates to the world. The conclusion, “The Eye Portrait’s Afterlife,” offers some thoughts on the eye portrait’s future in photography and the yet unexplored relation between the small-scale standardized format the photographic portrait brought about and its intimate connection with the miniature painting it replaced.

16 ¦ introduction

1 intimate vision The Portrait Miniature’s Structure of Address

Writing the history of a visual paradigm amounts, then, to writing the history of a phenomenology of gazes and touches. —georges didi-huberman

An Intimate Object Around 1790, an anonymous artist created a miniature portrait of an individual’s left eye (plate 1), mounted as a pendant. The eye calmly looks out at its beholder. The dreamy stare of its blue-gray iris reveals little about the face from which it has been detached. Compared to the eye in a similar ocular portrait, which is arched by a heavy brow and framed on the side by a hint of a sideburn (plate 2), the eye in plate 1 is most certainly a woman’s; slightly visible is a fine feminine curl hanging over its lid. Marginal as elements such as a curl, a sideburn, or part of a nose-bone may seem, they nonetheless give the eye a certain expression and thus imbue it with a 17

sense of individuality. Although it may be difficult to identify the sitter (or, for that matter, the artist), the motif of the curl or brow, often replaced to fit the composition, guarantees that these tiny images carry the status of portrait, rather than mere symbol. Making up part of a relatively small corpus that was created roughly between 1785 and 1830, reaching their apogee as a fashion in the last decade of the eighteenth century, eye pictures like these were considered portraits due to their usage. Suddenly popular in England, eye portraits spread slowly over Europe within a decade of their emergence and reached the United States a little later. This unusual type of portraiture soon appeared in a variety of settings. Rendered in watercolor on ivory, or sometimes in gouache on card, eye portraits were mounted in pins or brooches encrusted with half-pearls or brilliants, set in rings or gold bracelet clasps, or occasionally framed on the lids of snuffboxes, toothpick cases, dance programs, book covers, and other containers (figs. 1 and 2).1 Whereas most eyes look straight at the beholder, there are several instances in which the eye is portrayed in three-quarter or profile view (fig. 2). Considered to be a whim derived from regular portrait miniatures, the depicted eyes are never life-size but were always rendered “in the little,” in the same proportion as portrait miniatures. On average, the size of the depicted eye falls somewhere between the size of a lentil and that of a penny, while its support usually measures about 2–5 cm in diameter (with certain exceptions). Like portrait miniatures, eye miniatures were often placed in richly adorned lockets also containing neatly braided or woven hair with ciphers behind crystal or glass. Mounted as jewels, eye portraits were worn on the body. Whereas in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a wide variety of portraits are known in which sitters wear or hold portrait miniatures, there is not a single instance of a sitter carrying an eye miniature. We could conclude from such a lack of images that eye pictures were never prominently worn; however, it is more plausible that sitters did not wish to make their wearing of eye portraits “public” in a painting. Owners of eye portraits either preferred to keep them to themselves or, perhaps, attached them to their clothes in an unseen spot.2 This sense of privacy is also apparent in containers other than those for jewels, such as a snuffbox in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (plate 3). The rather large box (8.9×6.7 cm), made of gold sheathed in tortoiseshell, is richly decorated with a double foliate bordered medallion displaying plaited hair on its lid. If the secret and virtually invisible spring mechanism was pressed with a needle or pin, the medallion would swing open to reveal a woman’s right eye, painted in 18 ¦ chapter  1

figure 1.  Various eye miniatures, ca. 1800, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia.

figure 2.  Various eye miniatures, ca. 1800, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia.

grays and browns, accompanied by a lock of dark brown hair.3 This eye was once believed to be Marie Antoinette’s, smuggled out of France by one of her loyal subjects: by pressing the spring mechanism, her supporters abroad could treasure their queen’s gaze even after her beheading. However, Marie Antoinette’s eyes were not brown but light blue, as Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun’s portraits clearly show. The snuffbox does not yield its final secret; exposed or not, the dark eye withholds the mystery of its sitter’s identity. For most if not all eye portraits, the tiny support does not allow further parts of the face to be included, which makes it virtually impossible to know whose eye is depicted. The lack of even the most basic information needed to discriminate between faces greatly enhances the sense of privacy that surrounds these trinkets. Intimates would doubtless perceive the eye of their loved one in a flash of recognition, but to all others these eyes remain anonymous. Indeed, if we look again at the eyes in plates 1 and 2, we must admit that there is little to see. The sumptuous frame seems even to compensate for the lack of imagery, distracting us from the minimal depiction and drawing attention to the monetary value of its borders. Nonetheless, our eyes pause when glancing over the miniature irises, arrested by the slightly uncanny stare back at us. There is so little to go on in terms of the eye portrait’s nature as a picture, and yet plenty of seeing is going on—but on the side of the tiny picture rather than the beholder. The eye portrait is not merely an object of sight, a representation to look at, but appears to be exercising a kind of vision as well. We wonder who exactly does the looking here. Is it us, examining the tiny pictures, or are these spooky eyes exclusively there to watch us? Being a tiny image that looks back, the eye portrait is unique in the history of art. Arguably, there are countless portraits in which a sitter looks back at the viewer, but the argument can be made that his or her look is somehow balanced by the representation as a whole. For the viewer, the sitter’s pair of eyes, no matter how hard they look, would still be but one part of the larger painting, and the viewer’s attention would easily drift elsewhere in the work. For eye portraits, however, such distracted, circuitous viewing is impossible: the only thing to see is an eye, and the only action to examine in these tiny representations is the return of our gaze. There is a clear sense of “interpellation” or calling, precisely because there is nothing else to see but the “look.” The degree of interpellation that these eye portraits can achieve becomes even clearer when we compare an eye depicted in frontal view (as most are) with one painted in profile (fig. 2).

intimate vision ¦ 21

In terms of viewing positions, the eye in profile invites us to contemplate it as if we, as viewers, blended in with a larger audience, whereas the eye in frontal view seems to single us out, so to speak. We are called upon as a “you” in a situation that closely resembles a dialogue. The eye is an “I” that somehow seems to know us as it turns to us directly. In contrast, the eye in profile is depicted not as an “I” but as a she or he, and in grammatical terms occupies the third-person position: we hear “about” him or her, or look “with” the person within a larger narrative. This positioning differs greatly from the way we are addressed in a (visual) dialogue. We will be focusing on eyes confronting the viewer directly, as this kind of confrontation remains unprecedented in the history of images. If we assume that this eye indeed looks at the beholder, for what purpose is this looking carried out? What exactly is the structure of address implied by these eye portraits? It can be articulated by comparing the subcategory of eye pictures to that of their close relative, the miniature portrait, and reflect on the late-eighteenth-century economy of exchange in which they participated. As inscriptions on their reverse sides sometimes indicate, eye portraits were exchanged among lovers, friends, and family members; they took part in the system of gift giving that included hair jewelry as well. As we will see, the analogy between portrait miniatures’ economy of exchange and the intimacy of letter writing (as observed by Marcia Pointon) is particularly helpful to further articulate the structure of address of eye pictures. The fundamental difference between eye and miniature portraits is essential. In contrast to a miniature portrait, which can be stared at, held, pressed to a bosom, and kissed, eye portraits do not seem to invite such affectionate reactions, and yet they seem to “do” something to their beholder. If these eyes are so private as to be kept from view, what do they look at, or rather, what do they intend to see? There is a presumed reciprocity (of the gift, of a letter, of looking at someone) in the way miniatures in general, and eye portraits in particular, invite a special and exclusive response. What kind of meaning is implied or message exchanged in the gift of an eye picture? As we will see, the response implied by eye portraits is closely linked with the effect of miniatures in general on our perception of space. Starting from Susan Stewart’s idea that the miniature unfolds in space rather than in time, creating a kind of private life outside of life, I suggest that the eye’s structure of address dictates a set of deeply private viewing conditions for its beholder. Compared to the relatively public sphere invoked by life-size oil portraits and the more personal use of its miniature counterpart, the eye portrait should be seen as an object 22 ¦ chapter  1

of intense confidentiality or even secrecy, around which unfolds a space of intimacy rather than privacy. My hypothesis is that the eye portrait is a highly intensified kind of portrait miniature, indeed the most extreme iteration of this pictorial category, and as such provides a mode of private looking that goes beyond voyeurism or peeping. This mode has been virtually unexplored in the history of art and visual culture. Taking Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space as my framework, I suggest that eye portraits, by means of their tiny scale as well as their depiction of an active gaze, create a specific kind of space, a sort of exclusive scopic circuit, which I propose to call “intimate vision.”

The Eye as Gift In his classic study The Gift (1950), Marcel Mauss famously defines the gift as something given with the obligation that the favor be returned.4 Giving and receiving are reciprocal obligations, and it is in this exchange of material objects that social relations are established. Mauss suggests that gift giving is an ongoing process of exchange mapped out by the circulation of objects. In light of Mauss’s definition, we might ask to what extent the eye portrait, as a highly invested gift, must be understood not only as an autonomous artifact but also as a response to a previous gift. Following the idea of gift exchange as ongoing circulation, such picture-jewels invite a reply; or rather, they insist that the recipient take such action. Mauss’s theory of the gift suggests that the eye portrait must have entailed a set of actions and reactions; it was meant to set in motion a circulation of responses. The question arises whether we should understand these responses as ongoing actions, exclusively dictated by the gift, to be undertaken by its recipient, who in the course of the actions would be transformed into a gift giver. The gift of an eye miniature sets in motion a certain kind of reciprocity, yet not the ongoing gift giving that Mauss implies. In her article “‘Surrounded with Brilliants’: Miniature Portraits in Eighteenth-Century England,” Marcia Pointon reassesses the value of theories of gift giving by Mauss and others for understanding the meaning and use of portrait miniatures in the eighteenth century. She acknowledges the usefulness of placing what she calls the portrait-object in the economy of gift giving as an exchangeable consumer artifact. However, she notes that practices surrounding the gift of the portrait miniature seem to have diverged from the ongoing chain of reciprocal gestures established by Mauss and other anthropologists. Pointon proposes replacing Mauss’s intimate vision ¦ 23

theory of the gift as an approach to portrait miniatures. Starting from psychoanalytic notions of play, and taking into consideration the essential quality of tactility of portrait-objects (which, after all, need to be held to be viewed), Pointon considers how the giving of miniature portraits is culturally linked to the intimacy of letter writing. Not only does she see how the miniature and the letter as motifs in portraits or other representations are interchangeable (evidence of which can be found in Francis Wheatley’s well-known images in which women—sometimes in a state of undress, sometimes not—stare at miniatures while seated in boudoirs or reclining on beds [fig. 3]),5 but she also argues that the miniature could serve as an autograph, an idea that she sees further confirmed by evidence that in some cases portrait miniatures were used as letters of introduction.6

figure 3.  Francis Wheatley, The Miniature, 1787–88. Black and red chalk with watercolor. British Museum, London.

24 ¦ chapter  1

I would like to expand Pointon’s analogy between miniatures and letters (upon which she does not elaborate), as it may assist me in further analyzing what kinds of response the eye miniatures solicit. If indeed there is a relation between portrait miniatures and letters, could this relation be extended to include eye portraits? Can an eye have a specific message that requires a response exceeding the reciprocity presupposed in the gift in Mauss’s definition of the term? Could these portraits, in fact, be termed “speaking eyes”? Let’s look for a moment at Pompeo Batoni’s portrait of Sir Sampson Gideon awaiting a response, to get a better understanding of the exact relations among portraits, letters, and the role of the miniature as response. We see Gideon with an unidentified friend while visiting Rome on his Grand Tour (1767, plate 4).7 Seated at a desk on which rests a bust of Minerva, Gideon holds up for his friend’s inspection a locket containing a miniature portrait of a woman in his right hand. His friend, preparing to take the keepsake from him, gazes intensely at the likeness as if deep in thought. A dog tries in vain to attract his attention. The female sitter of the small picture is likely to be Maria Eardley Wilmot, Gideon’s fiancée. We see how Gideon’s friend, his head already slightly bent, is about to bring the trinket to his eyes to study the future bride more closely. His hand will raise the object toward his eyes to serve as its background, much as Gideon’s hand now functions as its exhibition space. Though we see the item literally changing hands in this portrait, it is interesting to note that the locket had not been given to Gideon personally by his bride-to-be. As the portrait demonstrates, the trinket has (just) arrived by post, sealed in the letter that Gideon holds in his left hand. Pointon observes that Batoni’s painting is further evidence for the way in which the portrait-object’s tactility enters affective discourse. She understands the central position of the miniature here as an instance of female presence as sentimental discourse, by which the homosocial relations between the two men become even more closely linked. Pointon’s observation is very apt; however, it is equally important to focus on another aspect of the relation between miniature and letter, especially as Batoni has made so much of recording that the miniature arrived through the mail: the letter on bottom left and the companion’s head are at equal distances from the locket, framing it, as it were. In addition, there is a clear dynamic of calling here, a tension even, between Wilmot and Gideon, between Gideon and his friend, and between his friend and the dog. The serious faces of the two sitters, Gideon’s anxious look directed toward his friend, and the sculpted Minerva’s averted gaze all suggest a narrative denouement. The intimate vision ¦ 25

clue for this miniature portrait’s quintessential position in the narrative it conveys, and the particular contrast between its private nature and its general exposure, must be found in its relation to the letter. By opening the locket to show its concealed portrait to his friend, Gideon has made this moment of private sharing public to the intended audience of this painting. Indeed, the practice of close-up viewing in relative isolation solicited by the miniature stands in sharp contrast with the excessive visibility Batoni has given to the locket by placing it in the center of his large composition for everyone to see. Whereas Wheatley’s erotically tinged image of a female figure obviously appeals to an anonymous, general audience, this double portrait must have been commissioned by Gideon with a clear acknowledgment of a particular group of beholders. Except for the protagonists of this gift-story, who, one wonders, would care to see the handing over of the locket on such a grand scale? It is likely that the locket containing Maria Eardley Wilmot’s picture as well as a lock of her hair has been presented to Gideon as a confirmation of their engagement.8 In contrast to what the locket means for the couple, the point of the painting is less the exchange of the miniature between them than its visibility for the portrait’s anticipated beholders. To the intended audience it is demonstrated that the locket has been mailed as an enclosure to a letter. The miniature serves here as a meaningful addition to the letter, its supplement. We may even say that the miniature, precisely because it has not been given to Gideon in person, is addressed rather than presented to him. What Batoni’s painting thus demonstrates is how socially accepted the assumed intertwining relation between letters and miniatures must have been. Before examining the way the eye portrait should be situated within this analogy, I would like to analyze the exact nature of the structure of address of miniature portraits, distinct from that of regular-sized oil portraits because of their nature as personal gifts. As a letter is always posted with the expectation of a reply, Wilmot’s miniature may also have been expected to elicit a gesture in return. What we see happening in Batoni’s painting is how the miniature’s structure of address works both ways: as a message implying an answer and as an instance, shown by the painting as a whole, of how that answer may be formulated.

The Portrait Miniature as Letter Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the French artist Jean-Baptiste Soyer (ca. 1790, plate 5) painted a seated, rather innocently smiling young 26 ¦ chapter  1

woman against an artificial backdrop showing a romantic landscape. Her right arm is supported by a rock; her right hand, with a gold band around the ring finger, is conspicuously placed in the center of the picture. In her left hand she clasps a letter that she must recently have received, because a red patch of sealing wax is still attached to the paper. Her open eyes and happy smile are welcoming, as if greeting us after a long absence, longing to tell us what is on her mind. We, as viewers, may delight in this welcome that embraces our glance—until we become slowly aware that this young lady’s soft gaze and delightful smile are not really meant for us. Her address is too determined to be intended for a general audience; indeed, as if only having eyes for the person whose letter she has just read, she seems to look right through us. This young woman seems fully prepared to be seen, in a manner as narcissistic as it is compliant, yet such viewing can be enjoyed only by a single beholder. Her eyes and even her entire body reach out to answer the imagined gaze of the loved one to whom this image is addressed. If there is a message in this image, it has been written by the language of her body. What exactly does her posture say? William Hazlitt, in his hilarious essay (written around 1810) on what it means to “strike a pose” under the staring eye of the artist, describes a sitting as a “trial of physiognomy.”9 In an artist’s studio, where sometimes small audiences would gather to watch the performance of portrait making, sitters are as anxious to make a favorable impression as stage actors would be. Apparently lacking more appropriate terminology, Hazlitt falls back on a discourse of love to define the exact nature of this trial. Like lovers who are never tired of each other’s company because they are always talking about themselves, he asserts, artist and sitter are accomplices. In their mutual effort to catch a likeness, they are thinking and talking of the same thing, namely the picture. When a portrait turns out unsuccessfully, Hazlitt writes, the sitter looks doubly foolish, “for we are ourselves parties to the plot, and have been at considerable pains to give evidence against ourselves.”10 Assuming her posture while holding a letter and showing her ring, Soyer’s lady in white is no doubt a party to the plot that writes this picture successfully. In Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt against the Italian Renaissance (2000), Harry Berger comments at length on how viewers are implied in a kind of narrative by self-aware attitudes that sitters take on in portraits. Though originally applied to Italian and Dutch paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Berger’s ideas about structures of address as a kind of disclosure, in which sitters seem to give away part of themselves, will be very fitting for understanding Soyer’s portrait miniature and the intimate vision ¦ 27

strategies the sitter employs to show herself. In his book, Berger explains portraiture’s scenario (invented by Leonardo, he claims) as a well-kept secret that the image, in fact, constitutes what it pretends to reflect. The fiction of the pose is the assumption that the artist, as a first observer, painted the sitter’s pose after life, so that both artist and sitter were actually present in the act of production. The pose struck by the sitter in the artist’s studio is meant to project his or her self-image for future viewers.11 Berger asserts that the fiction of the pose is what Michael Fried, in his Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (1980), called “detheatricalizing beholding.” In this classic book on the relation between painting and viewer in the eighteenth century, Fried explains how for Diderot the object-beholder relationship is essentially theatrical, as the theater is a medium of dislocation and estrangement rather than absorption.12 For Diderot, the success of painting and drama depends on the degree to which painters and dramatists are capable of undoing this situation, to “detheatricalize” beholding. Berger tailors Fried’s notion to portraiture when stating that it entails a sitter posing with the pretension not to pose (Berger, Fictions, 182–83). In the sixteenth-century portraits of Lorenzo Lotto, he observes how an apparently matter-of-fact and “detheatricalized” posture became a pattern. Lotto’s sitters may appear to lay out all their cards but actually do not give much away about themselves.13 For example, discussing Lotto’s famous portrait of the Venetian antiquities collector Andrea Odoni (1527, fig. 4), Berger convincingly argues that Lotto rhetorically employs the notion of anecdote in the original meaning of “things not given out” (from the Greek anecdota), in the sense of unpublished, secret, or private narratives. Surrounded by fragments of the classical sculptures he collects, Odoni stretches out his right hand to show a small, dismembered antique figure as if wanting to hand it over to us, its viewers, suggesting a genuine moment of exchange, of giving. Despite this gesture of passing on something, this imposing man gives away very little of himself, tightly wrapped as he is in a heavy coat with a large, fur-lined collar held together at his chest by his left hand. Appearing as if they present part of themselves with the objects they expose, Lotto’s protagonists invite us, their viewers, to look for a deeper meaning, an original context for the anecdote thus “published,” the secret history of which the pose is an index and extract (226). “But to respond to the invitation,” Berger writes, “is to encounter a diffidence that constitutes the observer as a voyeur peering into a new depth of privacy, a depth that comes to light in the specific fragment of life that the sitter devotes to being a sitter who publishes his secrets precisely as secrets.”14 28 ¦ chapter  1

figure 4.  Lorenzo Lotto, Portrait of Andrea Odoni, 1527. Oil on canvas. The Royal Collection, London.

The welcoming attitude of Soyer’s lady in white, however, is ambiguous about which precise fragment of her life she is “publishing” by means of this picture. Despite the artificial backdrop and the rock as stage prop, she cannot quite be described in Hazlitt’s terms as acting as if she were on stage; her disarming countenance and her most innocent smile are too convincing, too compelling. Neither can her posture be understood as inviting a mode of detheatricalized beholding resulting from the attempt to pose as if one were not posing. Her grasping gaze and willful exposure of the letter are too clearly advertising a certain message, one that her entire figure seems to underline. This message may be read as an extract that she brings out. Following Berger in this regard, this miniature is anecdotal, as it is a fragment (of a larger correspondence) insisting on the undisclosedness of intimate vision ¦ 29

this sitter’s presentation. Unlike Lotto’s Odoni, however, this picture does not publish the sitter’s secret as secret. Aware that her image will be studied, the smiling young woman, it appears, holds nothing back. The letter has been opened and turned with its written side toward us, giving evidence of its full disclosure and promising to be the clue to the message of her posture. Her smile and intent gaze betray desire or even submission regarding an answer to this letter. That is, this picture is her answer. And yet the epistle remains unreadable to anyone except the intended recipient. If secrets there be, Soyer’s woman has fully published them in the space allowed to her by this small picture. They will be disclosed neither to a general viewing audience that, for instance, Lotto and Odoni expected, nor to the sharp eyes of Hazlitt’s portraitist. No matter how deeply our voyeuristic gaze plunges into this tiny picture, the woman’s generosity entails a giving of something that cannot, strictly speaking, be given to just anyone. What she is prepared to give with this picture may only be stolen from her as an intimacy that, unlike her person, would never be absent from the scene of beholding, and that can be imagined as an intimate setting where she and the one she addresses are alone together.

The Portrait Miniature as Message and Reply Soyer’s miniature is an obvious instance in which letters and pictures become interchangeable in the course of a correspondence. The intimate setting designed by the exclusive structure of address, whereby the portraitas-message presupposes a strictly private beholder, becomes even more clear in other examples, including portrait miniatures that were commissioned as pendants. In an anonymous German miniature (ca. 1780, fig. 5), Countess Erdin decided not to risk a visual communication that would be relatively open to interpretation. In contrast to Soyer’s lady in white’s subtle undisclosedness, the countess seeks to deliver her message without ambiguity. She poses while holding up a card with a handwritten message for her gift’s intended German-speaking recipient: “Live long and healthy, so wishes my heart and speaks my mouth.” Despite her efforts to express herself unequivocally, the countess finds herself confronted with a paradox. She wants to include as text a wish that cannot be expressed or spoken within the miniature’s field of visibility; yet this text, which should articulate what she wants to say, contradicts her likeness, as her firmly pressed lips are precisely not speaking. This attempted fusion of portrait and letter appears to show the countess seeking to overcome the word-image opposition inherent in the analogy, described so aptly by Chevalier Danceny 30 ¦ chapter  1

to the Marquise de Merteuil in Choderlos de Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons (1782): “A letter is a portrait of the heart, and, unlike a picture, it has not that coldness, that fixity which is so alien to love.”15 Both Countess Erdin and Danceny were probably inspired by a famous passage from the popular medieval correspondence between Heloise and Abelard in which Heloise writes to her lover: “If a Picture, which is but a mute Representation of an Object, can give such Pleasure, what cannot Letters inspire? They have souls, they can speak.”16 The tension between letter and picture as two different versions of a portrait is described as the mute, cold, and fixed picture versus the warm, lively, and above all speaking letter.

figure 5.  Anonymous, Countess Erdin, ca. 1780. Watercolor and gouache on parchment. Tansey Collection, Coburg.

intimate vision ¦ 31

Evidently, in the late eighteenth century, this medieval comparison between the warm, speaking letter and the cold, mute image starts to shift. Among many indications of the shift is a letter by one of Lord Byron’s brief lovers, Lady Frances Webster, who writes in 1813 to the poet that she has grown so accustomed to the presence of his picture that it became something of a friend, an interlocutor even: “I cannot put it out of my sight. . . . It seems to speak to me—it speaks comfort to my wounded mind.” Or elsewhere: “Your picture dearest Byron is my constant Companion—I gaze at it—till every feature seems to speak.”17 This shift in understanding the miniature from a cold, mute representation to a speaking picture, is also apparent in a miniature portrait by Charles Hayter, created around 1800. We see a young boy wearing a school uniform. He has been identified as the son of a purser in the service of the East India Company who has been sent to school in England while his family stayed behind in India (plate 6). The boy holds a small picture displaying three figures against a background of a similar color to the background behind him. The image he holds in his hands actually exists (plate 7) and displays a woman, likely his mother, who embraces two younger siblings clutching a fruit basket. Apparently, his family chose to remember him holding a picture of themselves, as if they wished to see his attachment to an image of them. They want to remember him remembering them, to see him carrying a picture depicting them, to watch forever how the tiny index finger of his left hand points to the miniature, or rather, touches the painted surface as if grasping for contact over distance and time. This gesture makes the message of “keeping in touch” almost literal. As they look at and hold their pictures, the contact between the boy and his faraway family will not be severed, as long as they respond to his earnest stare. The exchange of pictures conveys visual messages expressed in an eloquent body language of love and affection. Indeed, as Pointon asserts, it is through the tactility of the portrait miniature that it enters affective discourse. The affective discourse is entered in a different way by two portraits of most likely a married couple painted in 1789 by Thomas Hazlehurst. The man appears to have sat for Hazlehurst first so that he could present the result as a gift to his wife (plate 8). Following the trend set by married women of wearing portraits of her husbands on their bodies, the woman in Hazlehurst’s miniature has decided to show herself as an object to be seen by society as a whole.18 She is declaring herself to be loyal to her husband by wearing his portrait around her neck (plate 9).19 Paradoxically, this carefully rendered “public” likeness would be enjoyed by her spouse only in the private sphere. As it was considered unmanly to wear portraits 32 ¦ chapter  1

on the body, the unknown man would probably have kept this likeness in a pocketbook, drawer, or writing box. Contemplating her picture only in solitude (or perhaps showing it to a close friend, as we have seen in Batoni’s picture), he could exult in his wife’s likeness as well as her public commitment to him in privacy. Including his portrait in hers, the miniature in a miniature doubles the intimacy of the scene, in spite of the woman’s emphasis on her public imago. The function of the picture’s theatricality is here revealed as a double staging. The woman’s body has turned into an “exhibition space” for her husband’s image—the sides of her collar fall around the frame as if it were a theater curtain—and she emphasizes her public persona while promising a continual repetition of the speech-act of the marriage vows. If this gift is a response to her receiving her husband’s miniature, the visual message is emphatically addressed to an invisible “you,” her husband. Indeed, following Pointon, this woman’s picture serves as an autograph, indeed as a signature completing a letter: “Look at me, I wear your portrait, I am, forever, your most affectionate, loving wife etc.”20 The structure of address in portrait miniatures and the way they function analogously to letter writing, or rather, serve as a letter’s reply and replacement, may have further consequences for Batoni’s double portrait. If we look at it again, the significance of the miniature at its very center has increased in the context of the miniature’s structure of address. If the picture’s arrival by post is apparently so significant, who exactly, we may ask, was this event staged for? Though we know very little about this portrait’s commission, in light of the present discussion we could speculate about the identity of this painting’s recipient. Who else but the miniature’s sitter would care about the locket’s presentation and find appropriate its monumental scale? Who else would Gideon be addressing when he let the miniature be placed at the heart of the painting as the focus of everyone’s attention? Lady Frances wrote to Byron about his picture being her “constant” and often-gazed-at companion. Likewise, Lady Louisa Connolly wrote to her sister around 1760 expressing how happy she was with the gift of her miniature portrait: “I have to wear [it] constantly; its [sic] the greatest pleasure almost I have, to look at it so constantly as I do.”21 The miniatures discussed so far indeed insist on being given intense attention, as confirmation of the bond of love. Miniature portraits like these have less to do with faithful representation (they are miniatures, after all) than with the intimate connections they establish through hard looking. Soyer’s lady in white poses in the expectation that she will be gazed upon—constantly— intimate vision ¦ 33

by an exclusive beholder for whom the trinket was made, and as such her message can be imagined as setting up an intimate space where her painted and the beholder’s actual eyes meet. In this semi-imaginary space evoked by the miniature, affection can be recalled. This imagined, purely optical space mapped out by an exchange of gazes, painted and real, constantly looking at one another, gets intensified in eye portraits. The intimate space of the miniature portrait in general, and the eye portrait in particular, is for the most part evoked by means of scale. As Susan Stewart explains in On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (1993), the hand is the miniature’s mode of display. Stewart highlights the miniature’s capacity to turn into a stage onto which the beholder projects a series of actions that unfold not in time but in a kind of shrunken space that falls outside of the normal proportions of the world around us. So that we can get a clear sense of the dimensions of this shrunken space, Gaston Bachelard’s classic The Poetics of Space, on which many of Stewart’s ideas are based, will be considered regarding intimate space evoked by the dialectics of inside and outside. The remainder of this chapter attempts to show what role the gaze plays in such dialectics, as it is capable of gaining access to shrunken or embedded spaces where no body can go.

Intimate Vision: A Daydream of Life inside Life In On Longing, Stewart explores the meaning of exaggeration through a series of paired and seemingly opposed metaphors, such as inside and outside or history and stasis. She is particularly interested in examining narratives of exaggeration, of the miniature and the gigantic and the ways that excessively small or large objects generate discourses around them. For Stewart, closely following Bachelard in this respect, these discourses are texts that precisely deal with the problematics of inside and outside, history and stasis, or visible and invisible. Thus starting from the notions of scale and proportion, she takes the body as her standard mode of perception, entangling its desire as a dichotomy of longing and belonging through an analysis of its intimate relation to objects. She makes a distinction between narratives generated by objects, such as the miniature, and objects generated by narrative, such as the souvenir. These objects become meaningful through exaggeration and through their relation between the part and the whole: the souvenir as covering the entire experience of a visit, the miniature as standing for its life-size model: “It is this very desire of part for whole which both animates narrative and, in fact, creates the 34 ¦ chapter  1

illusion of the real,” Stewart claims (xii).22 Engaging mostly with literary texts, Stewart examines wide-ranging objects, both produced by narrative or narrative-producing, that include the still life, the book, the dollhouse, and the portrait miniature, on which we will now focus. Following Nicholas Hilliard’s insistence, in his Treatise concerning the Arte of Limning (1600), on the fundamental difference between limning and other ways of painting and drawing the human body, Stewart bestows on the portrait miniature a sense of magic. Independent of the life of the body, the face-in-little can be contemplated as a deep text, she asserts, that can be read, a process in which the bodies of author and reader, or of beholder and sitter, become strangely disembodied as if they through the miniature state are in fact created (125). The portrait in a locket only intensifies this sense of profundity and interiority that the face can reveal but the body cannot. Wearing a locket on the body (which, as we have seen, was the fashion for women in the eighteenth century) signifies for Stewart a double interiority that mimics bourgeois marriage. This type of marriage, as she defines it, is founded on the idea of the heart located within the body as the deepest sense of self, and the loved one residing in the heart as its content. The miniature portrait ensures the close bond, as it is “always there,” its image always accessible to the gaze of the one possessing it, who will see in it, as if it were a crystal ball, a reflection of requited love (126). Its magic, as Stewart calls it, is dependent on possession of the portrait as object, as well as of its readable face. Therefore, the locket is always threatened by loss. (To a certain extent, the double miniature portrait of the wife wearing her husband’s portrait on her bosom confirms Stewart’s views.) Thus, in comparison to the idea of the gigantic, the miniature in general stands at the origin of private, individual history (71). Comparing it to its opposite, the gigantic—from which originates public and natural history—the miniature evokes stillness. It pushes the normally scaled world outside of its space. This contrast between two forms of portraiture has been played out, for instance, in Batoni’s picture as a tension between solitary looking and public viewing effected by the two categories. Indeed, oil paintings stage statesmen, politicians, heiresses, matrons, and the like, whereas miniatures depict a lover, a brother, or, as in Gideon’s case, a bride-to-be. The full-length portrait of the two men dressed to go out differs greatly from the tiny bust-size portrait in the locket of the woman clad in a plain white-pinkish garment with a deep décolletage. The privacy as such that has been evoked is further emphasized by the inclusion of a lock of her brown hair in the locket’s inside lid. Placed at the center of this large double portrait, the intimate keepsake as a whole appears as a slightly intimate vision ¦ 35

unfamiliar or even foreign object, breaking with the register of the sitters’ formal dress. The tension between the two kinds of portraiture may be further explained by Stewart’s understanding of the intertwining of time and space in the miniature. Whereas speech and narrative unfold in time, she asserts, the miniature places itself outside of historical time as it locates itself and the space surrounding it on a different scale. Space seems to shrink around the miniature. Indeed, Stewart explains that the miniature’s “use value” is its allowance for the creation of a space where time does not seem to exist. The miniature’s measure may be the hand, but once the miniature is placed within it, the hand is no longer in proportion with the outside world (70). As Gideon’s friend reveals when bending over the locket in his hand, the world of the miniature will open up as a self-enclosed realm outside of time, where stillness rules. The way miniatures create a meaningful space around them, and thus bestow an intense sense of privacy on themselves, can be further evidenced by the account of a visit to Queen Elizabeth I by Sir James Melville in 1564. In his Memoirs, Melville, ambassador to Mary, Queen of Scots, recounts his mission concerning failed negotiations involving a proposed marriage between one of Elizabeth’s favorites, the Earl of Leicester, and her cousin Mary. Melville describes being led through the labyrinthine apartments of Whitehall into the royal bedchamber, where an important conversation about the match took place before a cabinet containing miniature portraits. When Elizabeth opened the cabinet, Melville noted how some pictures were wrapped in paper on which the names of the sitters were written in the queen’s own hand. Elizabeth unwrapped a picture of Leicester that had been enveloped in a piece of paper labeled “My Lord’s Picture.” When Melville suggested making it a gift for Mary, Elizabeth was reluctant to part with it. Instead, she took out the picture of Mary and kissed it. Patricia Fumerton closely examines this famous passage as exemplifying the antithesis of Elizabethan public and private selves in Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (1991). In this book, Fumerton focuses on aristocratic subjectivity and the ways it was “caught in the trivial intersection between the historical and the aesthetic . . . the historically “useless” arts of gifts, chivalric romances, miniatures [and] sonnets” (2).23 Fumerton starts from the idea that Elizabethan and Jacobean aristocracy began to live the “practice of social ornament” in an attempt to redraw the fine balance between public and private self in contrast to other classes. For Fumerton, the play of trivial ornaments marks out the boundaries of this conflict. In her chapter on Elizabethan 36 ¦ chapter  1

miniatures and sonnets, she argues that the Elizabethan style of self-representation is the exact reverse of the modern understanding of subjectivity. Following Richard Sennett, who defines modern subjectivity as representing public experience as essentially private, Fumerton claims that Elizabethans represented private experience as public. Indeed, for Elizabeth, whose whole life was lived in public view, a sense of privacy could be obtained only as a fiction, in the form of a room or cabinet locked up in a corner of the house, all the while remaining in full view. For Fumerton, the disclosure of the queen’s cabinet of miniatures must thus be understood as a way of drawing the ambassador inward, all the while withholding her secret self in a game of courtly love that characterized court life during her reign. Interestingly, we may see here a dynamic about revelation and concealment of the self comparable to the disclosures of Odoni in Lotto’s portrait and the lady in white in Soyer’s miniature. The encounter between Elizabeth and the ambassador in front of the cabinet is an intensely confidential moment consisting of a series of delicate political maneuvers that take place in an atmosphere of privacy facilitated by miniature portraits, or rather by their “publication,” in the literal sense of making public. Melville has been led into the room that contains not only the queen’s personal belongings but seemingly the very secret of Elizabeth’s inner self. When Elizabeth takes out Leicester’s picture, she acts as if she is loath to unwrap it and let Melville view it. Its small scale forces Melville to bend over: “I held the candle, and pressed to see that picture so named,” he writes. Fumerton concludes that “for a moment, we seem to spy into the most private recess of the Queen’s ‘inward mind’ ” (68). The publication of the miniature has thus turned into the publication of subjectivity without giving anything away, much like Lotto’s Odoni or Soyer’s lady: a withdrawal played out as a giving away. The location of the encounter is essential for this act to take place. To reach the royal bedchamber, Melville would have passed through the public state galleries (whose walls were doubtless lined with life-size oil portraits) where the court would gather during events, through more private audience rooms, to privy chambers accessible to only a select group of people, to the inner sanctum of the royal bedchamber (71). Fumerton observes what she calls a “co-location” between architecture and miniatures, between private chambers and the cabinets and other containers where miniatures were kept. In particular, she studies the often highly ornate cases or picture boxes in which Elizabethan miniatures were set. Thus, the publication of a miniature required a series of acts of opening. For example, the famous Armada jewel can be viewed only when one intimate vision ¦ 37

pries its outer—public or social—shell so as to force the private parts of the jewel, that is, the picture, to become visible. This structure of revelation by means of acts of peeling and incursion Fumerton sees duplicated in the layout of a palace as much as in the design of a cabinet or the creation of a portrait-jewel, in the sense that a series of actions are required to gain access, to penetrate into the deepest and most intimate jeweled container, the privy chamber or the cabinet. Even unwrapping the paper enveloping a picture should be considered one of these semitheatrical acts of revelation. Within the dynamics of opening and closing evoked by miniature portraits, eye portraits function in a similar dialectic of revelation and concealment. However, eye portraits differ fundamentally from portrait miniatures in their operation within the field of vision. An eye miniature can never serve as substitute for an absent loved one in the same way as a portrait miniature can. Examples from literature as well as painting show that a portrait miniature is treated, beyond the limits of representation, as if it were alive. Miniature portraits were carried, clasped to bosoms, talked to, and even kissed, as for instance the portrait of Eliza is kissed by Laurence Sterne’s Yorick. Stewart is right in emphasizing one’s access (which includes touch) to the image of the face when in possession of the miniature, but with eye portraits the face cannot be “read” by the owner of the miniature: rather, the reverse is implied. Departing from Stewart’s insistence that possession of the miniature as part of the body is essential in that it would propel the desire for the whole, I suggest that the eye portrait is not a synecdoche; the depicted iris does not merely stand in for the face as a whole, and therefore its significance lies not so much in the owner’s desire for the whole. On the contrary, it is not the owner who possesses the eye, but rather the reverse. It seems that the eye, in giving so little to see, possesses its viewer in the sense of captivating him or her with its gaze rather than being possessed by him or her. What we look at in eye portraits is the loved one’s gaze from the “other side” of the visual spectrum, a gaze that longs to reach out, touch, or “read” the owner’s face. How can we define the space where there can be such a return of an “active” gaze? What are the implications for our understanding of the beholding of portraits when it results in a shrinking of space, a stopping of time, and an overall stillness? Moreover, what are the consequences of this kind of seeing from the side of the picture for the role of the self addressed by it? We may be able to answer these questions when we examine the dialectics of inside and outside as formulated by Bachelard. Though she does not mention his work anywhere in her book, Fum38 ¦ chapter  1

erton’s co-location of miniature containers with architecture in a liminal zone where the interplay between public and private occurs recalls the parallel Bachelard famously draws between the domestic space of the house and that of the wardrobe, recognizing the importance of positioning the self in such contained spaces and our dealings with opening and closing them. Bachelard’s monumental Poetics of Space has obviously been a source of inspiration to Stewart, not least because of its major claim that intimate spaces such as attics, wardrobes, baskets, and shells allow us to daydream and thus give us room to experience a life within a life. Unlike Fumerton, for whom the entanglement of the private sphere with public life has been a site for withdrawal and revelation of subjectivity, Bachelard and Stewart deal with a type of recess that goes even further into interiority, a space of intimacy that ultimately allows one to be alone with oneself. It is this solitude found in particular spaces, or rather, in the opening up of these spaces, that Bachelard investigates. Like the surroundings of Stewart’s miniature, around which space seem to shrink, a life within a life seems to nestle in the hidden corners Bachelard writes about, places where we can give ourselves over to reverie. Before explaining the ways that portrait miniatures, and in particular eye pictures, produce an intimate space that solicits a particular mode of looking, or rather of a (reciprocal) seeing that I propose to call intimate vision, I would like to discuss Bachelard’s seminal text as a foundation for this term. In his investigation, the poetic image as a disruptive epistemological obstacle, just like Stewart’s miniature—and, as we will see, our eye miniature—does not have a past.

The Poetics of Space In The Poetics of Space Bachelard intends to undertake a systematic study of intimate spaces. Departing from the idea that space is geometrical, the philosopher draws up a topography of private places where we as humans dwell. His methodology is as original as it is effective: to provide an alternative to the ocularcentric accounts of space found in Descartes and the Enlightenment thinkers, Bachelard examines intimate space on the basis of a study of poetry, or, more precisely, what he calls “poetic images.” As being does not see itself, Bachelard reasons, and sight sees too many things at the same time, we should realize, as psychoanalysis teaches us, that all metaphysics is discursive (214).24 Language should be understood not as an instrument of communication but as a reality, an intense form of life. Therefore, to explore the significance of intimate spaces such as corners, cradles, attics, boxes, drawers, nests, shells, and miniatures, Bachelard intimate vision ¦ 39

turns to the language of the poetic image. The poetic image posits for him an epistemological obstacle, a disruption of preconceived ways to knowledge. Informed as much by phenomenology as by (Jungian) psychoanalysis, Bachelard utilizes the poetic image to lead his inquiry away from the continuities within systems of knowledge toward obstacles that interrupt the continuum. Encountering such objects forces new ideas to appear and hence alter the course of thought. The poetic image is not an echo or reflection of something. Bachelard points out that while standing at the origin of the speaking being (xxiii), the poetic image does not have a past in the sense that it can be traced; it is not rooted or anchored somewhere. Rather, it springs up in language as if it were suddenly springing forth from language itself. Thus it interrupts patterns of knowing and, as a result, directs pathways of thinking along alternative routes. To read poetry is essentially to daydream (17), and to daydream means to allow poetic images to spring forth as one’s thoughts wander. The poetic image is brief, sudden, ephemeral, “always there”—yet it remains outside of time or history. Phenomenology should learn from the brevity of the image, Bachelard suggests, and among the many things it may learn from it is the importance and meaning of intimate spaces for us human beings, not only as places where we can be alone with ourselves but indeed as conditions for knowledge. Ultimately, the project of his book is to draw up a topography of our intimate being, of various locations in the house as well as the wardrobe, the chest of drawers, the box or casket, the nest, the shell, and the miniature, places where we find intimacy while continually “storing” intimate thoughts within such spaces. Such places as boxes or attics are called “intimate” because they are not open to just anybody. They first need to be opened by us. Their locks present a psychological threshold. It is important to note that Bachelard does not deal with nests or shells as metaphors of intimacy but as images. He critiques Henri Bergson’s use of the metaphor of the drawer for the collection and recollection of memory to demonstrate the inadequacy of a philosophy of concepts that results in classified thinking (75). Going beyond Bergson, Bachelard is not interested in how knowledge is like a filing cabinet but in how a filing cabinet is an intelligence. Architecture, furniture, and small-scale objects serve as images rather than metaphors of intimacy. He observes how the affinities among architecture, wardrobes, and chests with false bottoms reveal their hybrid state as what he calls “subject objects,” things that are the “organs” of our secret psychological life. “Without these ‘objects,’ ” Bachelard writes, “our intimate life would lack a model of intimacy” (78). The power of such intimacy lies precisely in the fact that such spaces can be opened. “When a 40 ¦ chapter  1

casket is closed, it is returned to the general community of objects; it takes its place in exterior space. But it opens!” (85). The dimension of intimacy is extended when the outside is no longer meaningful, once the inside of a casket is exposed. Opening up the container means that the rest of the exterior world is, so to speak, “canceled out.” The “subject-object” quality of inner space ascribed by Bachelard to the wardrobe, box, or casket can be extended to the locket, snuffbox, or writing box, or even to the unfolding of the letter. If we look at an earlyeighteenth-century genre painting by Jean Raoux (ca. 1710, plate 10), we see how these various forms of intimate space get intertwined on the level of the miniature: Raoux shows us a lady who reads a letter taken from a casket just small enough to hold it. Opened, the box’s cover’s interior lid displays a miniature portrait. Evidently, the significance of the subject-object lies in its opening: when closed, the painted portrait and the “portrait of the soul” would fold together and the meaningful trinkets become one object among others. The opening up of a snuffbox or a letter will result in the redesign of the surrounding space to the extent that time will come to a halt, and the room will shrink, as Stewart so aptly describes it, into a self-enclosed monad, a life within life, from which daydreams will spring. Like Elizabeth’s cabinet and the little letter box in Raoux’s painting, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries caskets, jewel cases, and writing boxes—where billets-doux were kept alongside miniature portraits and hair locks—were typical intimate spaces where small interior worlds would open up to a beholder’s gaze. Here was where the revelation and concealment of pictures took place. Such places, as Bachelard argues, thus become, in fact, models of thought. We can see how well lockets, snuffboxes, and writing boxes containing eye or miniature portraits fit within Bachelard’s topoanalysis as objects that can be activated when opened up and turn into subject-objects as a result. Whereas Fumerton stresses the miniature as drawing out a liminal zone between public and private, Bachelard is interested in the distinction between the private and the intimate. Letters and miniatures collaborate in creating the shrunken sphere of intimacy, as many literary publications of the time demonstrate. For example, in Elizabeth Griffith’s novel The Delicate Distress (1787), the main character, Seymour, writes to a friend about how he spends evening after evening staring at the picture of his beloved and admired marchioness, until the moment when, losing his calm, he becomes possessed by his passionate feelings. One night he decides to conquer his obsession by locking the picture in his writing box and throwing the key into the fire so that “it might not be in my power to gaze away my reason, for that night, at intimate vision ¦ 41

least.”25 The opening and closing of Seymour’s writing box, and as a consequence the imprisonment and release of the picture, apparently expands the dimension of intimacy to such an extent that looking at the image is experienced as immense and overwhelming. What we see is another instance of how the miniature alters the perception of the space surrounding it, in this case accumulating to such a degree as to fill up Seymour’s (mental) space. The danger lies in taking out the picture by which he will “gaze away his reason.” In his obsessive attention, the portrait miniature blows up to monumental proportions, or rather, the whole world shrinks to its scale, ever narrowing Seymour’s perception. What is important here is that Seymour tries to retain his sanity not just by opening and closing the box. Indeed, bringing Stewart’s and Bachelard’s ideas together here, the miniature of his beloved as such determines the space. Just like Melville had to bend over to see not merely the picture in the queen’s hand but also her inward mind, Seymour is taken by the desire to be fascinated by the picture by bringing it close to his eyes. The beholder’s attention functions here like a magnifying glass through which the miniature’s embedded “life” is enlarged while the surrounding exterior world is canceled out. The inside of the writing box, the locket, the palm of one’s hand holding the miniature expand to such an extent that the surrounding space is taken over; in Seymour’s case in particular, this means all mental space. Thus opening up the miniature world result in the spatial closure of the outside. However, unlike Fumerton’s “co-location,” it is not only the space of the cabinet containing the miniature but the object as such that designates a place of intimacy. This is what Stewart calls the theatricality of the miniature: Our transcendent viewpoint makes us perceive the miniature as object and this has a double effect. First, the object in its perfect stasis nevertheless suggests use, implementation, and contextualization. And second, the representative quality of the miniature makes that contextualization an allusive one; the miniature becomes a stage on which we project, by means of association or intertextuality, a deliberately framed series of actions. . . . The miniature offers us a transcendent vision which is known only through the visual. In approaching the miniature, our bodies erupt into a confusion of before-unrealized surfaces. We are able to hold the miniature object within our hand, but our hand is no longer in proportion with the world. . . . Once the miniature world is self-enclosed . . . we can only stand outside, looking in. (54, 70) 42 ¦ chapter  1

Stewart argues that the shrinking of space, the enlarging of the miniature world, and the paradox of these dynamics resulting from a static object are essentially visual. The series of actions thus set in motion are like those solicited by the son of the purser and the lady in white, and acted out by Seymour and, to a certain extent, Gideon when commissioning the portrait. The miniature is capable of turning the space around it into a universe, albeit an intensely private one. Indeed, as Bachelard explains, there is a vastness to miniature, as it can accumulate size (215). Moreover, in staging these actions and orchestrating these dynamics of shrinking and filling space, the miniature changes the beholder’s viewpoint. Through the miniature the beholder’s focus is granted magnifying power, and through this exaggerated focus, preconceived patterns of knowledge are shattered and thought proceeds in unexplored pathways. Eye portraits should be situated at the center of this dynamic as a transcendent vision that can be known only through the visual. Going beyond Stewart’s notion that the miniature world is self-enclosed, I suggest that with eye miniatures we do not “stand outside, looking in,” but fully participate in the miniaturized yet vast space that they evoke. If the eye picture functions as a stage on which we project a series of actions, then one of these actions is our being seen by the eye. And here the fundamental difference between portrait and eye miniatures can be further drawn out: the eye does not stand in the way the miniature face represents the actual body, but is an image of a gaze that functions like a spotlight on the miniature’s stage. This notion of being seen by the imagined gaze of a loved one should be understood as the intensified response solicited, for instance, by Soyer’s portrait: as a gaze of the beloved resting upon you, for which the lady in white—constantly—intends to pose. Obviously there is magic attached to the eye miniature; it functions like a magic ball in which one sees reflected not so much the other person, or one’s requited love, but oneself, as being seen. As a kind of mirror, the eye portrait can be considered a hyperintensified version of the late-eighteenth-century miniature portrait. It reveals that ultimately the loved one’s gaze prevails over his or her image; indeed, we may see it as a radical consequence of constant gazing at portrait miniatures. The passion that Lady Frances for her Byron portrait and Seymour for the marchioness’s picture act out is, after all, a fascination for the image, which fixates them as much as their eyes are fixated on it. In the eighteenth century, to gaze literally means “to fixate,” and it is this kind of fascination that eye pictures transcribe. By fixating its object of sight, the eye portrait turns the beholder into an image.

intimate vision ¦ 43

Just as Bachelard’s subject-objects open up a location to store memories in, an imaginary room that serves not only as a model for conceiving ourselves in the world but also as a refuge, the eye picture opens up a diminished space of vision. In this space, the beholder-addressee locks eyes with the sitter-sender in a short circuit of vision in which the gaze of the beholder is, always, constantly answered, or rather, fascinated. When we say that someone is fascinated, the phrase has a double meaning: the subject is overwhelmed by what she or he sees, and is also the object of fascination. In that sense, like Bachelard’s poetic image springing forth as if from language itself, the painted gaze springs forth from vision itself, or rather, from its exchange, or the locking of eyes, albeit painted or real. “Language bears within itself the dialectics of open and closed,” Bachelard writes. “Through meaning it encloses, while through poetic expression, it opens up” (222). I will demonstrate in the next few chapters that the portrait-object in general and the eye portrait in particular bear within themselves the dialectics of open and closed, which, for the eye portrait, result in a reversal of the traditional subject-object opposition always implied by works of art. By answering the look of the beholder, eye portraits offer us a startling image, whether or not poetic, that interrupts our understanding of classic patterns of viewing. The eye picture is in that respect a puzzling obstacle, unfamiliar to our traditional conception of the image, and offers great potential for forcing new pathways of thinking and looking. In its clash of image and gaze, its full embodiment of the “look,” the eye picture is an unique instance in the history of art, a site where a fusion of subject and object of looking occurs. If there is meaning in these eye portraits, it is articulated less as symbolic significance that can be read and more as a (poetic) pictorial expression that opens up a space in which the beholder can see himself or herself. The eye portrait, as we will see, serves as a kind of channel or portal through which the gaze of the loved one can be imagined as resting—constantly—upon the beholder.

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2 gazing games Eye Portraits and the Two Sexes of Sight

Which eye can see itself? —stendhal, The Life of Henry Brulard

Eye Portraits as Wedding Rings In March 1784, shortly after meeting the recently widowed Mrs. Maria Fitzherbert at the opera in London, the smitten twenty-one-year-old Prince of Wales declared his wish to marry his new acquaintance. Unfortunately for him, the Royal Marriage Act stipulated that until the age of twenty-five, he could not be married without his father’s consent. It was highly unlikely that King George III would ever willingly allow his son to marry a Catholic widow, and it was equally improbable that the strictly observant Mrs. Fitzherbert would become the prince’s mistress. In despair, the prince stabbed himself and was found covered in blood. Hoping to force a promise of marriage from his beloved Maria, he had staged a 45

suicide attempt. Mrs. Fitzherbert could not enter the prince’s residence, Carleton House, by herself; accompanied by their mutual friend Lady Georgiana, the magnificent Duchess of Devonshire, she rushed to the prince’s bedside. The prince’s life was not in danger, but he would not calm down unless Mrs. Fitzherbert agreed to marry him on the spot. Under such pressure, Mrs. Fitzherbert yielded and agreed to wed the bleeding prince. Lady Georgiana took a ring from her finger and handed it to His Royal Highness, who placed it on the finger of his beloved. Thus, with the barest minimum of formality, a wedding ceremony was performed. This “marriage” entailed no legal commitment, and Mrs. Fitzherbert, coming to her senses the next day, left England for the Continent and remained there for more than a year, hoping the prince’s love would fade. But he persisted, and in his famous letter of November 3, 1785, he again proposed marriage, begging Mrs. Fitzherbert to return to England. Instead of a wedding ring, he sent along an “eye”: “P.S. I send you a Parcel . . . and I send you at the same time an Eye, if you have not totally forgotten the whole countenance. I think the likeness will strike you.”1 This “Eye” was a very small miniature painting of the prince’s right eye, created by his friend the celebrated miniaturist Richard Cosway

figure 6.  Richard Cosway, Eye Portrait of George, Prince of Wales, 1785. Watercolor on ivory. Private collection.

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and probably identical to the one shown in figure 6. Whether or not the eye’s likeness struck Mrs. Fitzherbert, it must have bolstered the prince’s marriage proposal, because she returned to England and married him in a secret ceremony on December 15, 1785. Shortly after the clandestine wedding, Cosway also painted the eye of Mrs. Fitzherbert in an oval setting for the prince (plate 11).2 This romantic exchange of eye portraits initiated a fashion for such trinkets among British nobility, a trend that slowly spread across Europe, reaching its peak in the first decade of the nineteenth century. If we assume that these eye portraits contain not a picture of someone’s eye but a portrayal of an individual’s gaze, they have a double function as representation and agent of vision. What consequences may the double function have had for the role and function of eye portraits, as well as for a more general understanding of vision? I will focus on the socialcultural meaning that was attached to giving, wearing, looking at, and perhaps even showing to others a depiction of monocular staring that was still called a portrait. What exactly does the fashion for exchanging such trinkets reveal about social networks of looking and the power dynamics of the (gender) positions within these networks? Is the depicted eye loving or voyeuristic, omni-seeing or on its guard, answering or demanding? Does it imply a particular message as gift, or is it at all related to the longstanding iconography of the single eye? Or are these eyes, on the contrary, not meaningful but rather striving for an effect or affect within social networks of seeing? The eye picture’s origins and its role and function in social networks of seeing will be further investigated by focusing on the cultural-historical context of its production in late-eighteenth-century England. Following Marcia Pointon, who has coined the term “gazing games” to describe a social network of looking that emerged in the late eighteenth century in England, I assert that eye portraits articulate a specific mode of looking: being subjected to someone’s gaze, or provoked, or haunted.3 To what extent do eye portraits represent a peeping or spying gaze, as if the eyes depicted were looking through a keyhole? To describe the effects of such playful gazing in public as well as private spheres, we will concentrate on the role eye miniatures played in the affair of the Prince of Wales and Mrs. Fitzherbert. Eye pictures must have served as intensely private objects that were recognizable and meaningful only to the intended recipient of the gift and remained obscure to all others. Therefore, they should be approached as objects that, as I will demonstrate, produce specific meanings unaccounted for by iconographic or mimetic readings. The unknown gazing games ¦ 47

trajectory charted by such objects gives us, as art historians, the rare opportunity to question the roots of all-too-familiar concepts and reinvestigate the essence of frequently used and virtually worn-out terms starting from the object as such, on its terms. This chapter exploits theoretically the reversal of subject and object of looking that is stipulated by eye miniatures. To do so allows for a further exploration that may lead us beyond dominant concepts of voyeurism and surveillance to alternative ways of seeing that are at once intensely private and responsive—intimate modes of vision. But I will first trace the eye portrait’s origins back to 1785, when the fashion for these intriguing trinkets was born, and briefly sketch the potent iconography of single-eye representations as a background against which these ocular portraits emerged.

A Very Short History of Eye Miniatures In his short essay “Miniature Paintings of Eyes,” published in the Connoisseur in 1904, the miniature expert George Charles Williamson claims that Cosway was the artist who introduced the idea of painting eyes in miniature. An eye commissioned by Mrs. Fitzherbert as a birthday present to the Prince of Wales was said to be the first such eye ever painted. In the introductory chapter to Sehende Bilder: Die Geschichte des Augenmotivs dem 19. Jahrhundert (1992), Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, describing the history of eye portraits as a prelude or prehistory to the motif of the eye in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art, points to the flaws in Williamson’s bold statements. Apparently unaware that the eye pictures of the prince and his morganatic wife must have been rendered in 1785 or 1786, Williamson quotes from the Fee-Book of Cosway’s alleged rival George Engleheart, which lists a portrait as well as an eye picture commissioned from a certain Mrs. Quarrington in 1783, a fact he had already mentioned in his George Engleheart (1902).4 Later he offers a slightly more nuanced view in a small piece called “Eyes,” included in his 1933 volume Memoirs in Miniature: A Volume of Random Reminiscences. If the reference in Engleheart’s Fee-Book is accurate, Mrs. Fitzherbert’s eye could not have been the first of its kind. Indeed, based on a “List of Outstanding Debts” that was part of the 1820 Cosway Inventory, Stephen Lloyd dates Mrs. Fitzherbert’s eye at 1786. The items the Prince of Wales had yet to pay for in 1820 included for 1785 “His Eye,” for 1786 “Mrs. F’s Eye,” and for 1795 again “His Eye,” all at a price of five and a half guineas.5 Regardless of who can be credited with inventing the eye portrait, collectors and connoisseurs have frequently remarked that when making 48 ¦ chapter  2

regular miniatures, both Engleheart and Cosway tended to enlarge their sitters’ eyes. In addition, Cosway would create enough distance to allow a third eye to fit between them.6 Of Engleheart it is said that he made his sitters’ eyes large and deep-set beneath heavy eyebrows.7 Further evidence against the attractive anecdote of Mrs. Fitzherbert’s eye as a point of origin are two almost identical memorial rings (in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Daphne Foskett Collection, respectively) in which eye portraits are set. Both have “1782” in relation to a name of a deceased person inscribed on the back of the bezel, although they may have been created later. Interestingly, eye portraits may not have been an English invention at all. Early accounts reveal that eye miniatures were initially regarded in Britain as a French novelty. On December 6, 1785, about a week before the secret wedding of Mrs. Fitzherbert and her prince, Lady Eleanor Butler, one of the eccentric Ladies of Llangollen, noted in her diary that two brothers of a family of her acquaintance had paid a visit, one of them having recently returned from the Continent. He had brought a series of treasures, among them “An Eye, done at Paris and Set in a Ring. A true French Idea, and a delightful Idea, which I admire more that I confess of its singular Beauty and Originality.”8 By that time, if we are to believe Horace Walpole, a fashion for having eye portraits painted was already established. He exclaimed in a letter to the Countess of Ossory in October 1785: “But do you know, Madam, that the fashion now is, not to have portraits but of an eye? They say, ‘Lord, don’t you know it? A Frenchman is come over to paint eyes here!’ ”9 Dismissive of this French “folly,” Walpole makes no further mention of eye pictures and, unfortunately, does not reveal the identity of this French painter. An 1814 print by George Emanuel Opitz (1775–1841) reveals where in Paris one might have purchased an eye portrait (fig. 7). Opitz devoted most of his career to depicting popular scenes of Parisian life and gives us here an insight into the Camp of the Tartars, a wooden shopping arcade built on the site of the Palais Royal in the 1780s. A hangout for “debauched youths, thieves, petits-maitres, swindlers, prostitutes, and financiers,” in the words of Robert Isherwood, this was apparently the place to commission an eye miniature if we take Optiz’s print as evidence.10 In the right foreground of this scene, in which visitors stroll down the arcade, we see a shop window displaying large and small models of eye portraits. In her short essay “Eye Portraits,” published in 1925, amateur collector Mary Martin also suggests that eye pictures had their roots in France; she links them to the eye of providence adorning the title plate of the French gazing games ¦ 49

figure 7.  George Emanuel Opitz, Les champs des Tartars au Palais Royal, 1814. Watercolor. Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg, Coburg.

Declaration of Human Rights. A similar eye appears on certain types of documentation such as passports. Probably following Max von Boehn’s work on fashion and miniatures, Martin suggests that the fashion for eye portraits grew out of the Parisian craze of the 1770s for tailcoat buttons decorated with scenes painted in miniature.11 Usually made by second-rate artists, such buttons were occasionally created by prominent painters such as Jean-Honoré Fragonard, who is said to have made a set displaying Watteau scenes; according to his own records, Jean-Baptiste Isabey started his career decorating buttons with flowers, cupids, and the like.12 The earlytwentieth-century miniature specialist Howard Basil mentions that he had seen an eye miniature by Isabey of Madame Grand’s, Talleyrand’s notorious mistress, but that claim remains uncorroborated.13 Not everyone appreciated the latest whim in fashion. One of the anonymous writers of the Parisian chronicle Mémoires Secrets, which was published in thirty-six volumes between 1777 and 1789, wrote on November 50 ¦ chapter  2

figure 8.  Buttons with generic eye portraits. Photo from Diana Epstein and Milicent Safro, Buttons (New York, Harry Abrams, 1991), 57.

18, 1786: “There is no fashion which the folly, superficiality and passion for excess of our elegants does not reduce to a foolish idiosyncrasy. They have driven this craze for buttons to ridiculous lengths and now wear them not only of inordinate size—as big as a six franc piece—but with miniatures or whole pictures on them, so that some sets cost fabulous sums.”14 Many examples of portraits of this period show out-of-proportion buttons.15 In addition to watercolors rendered by miniature artists, buttons containing etchings of individual eyes exist (fig. 8). Set in plain steel mounts or framed by crystals or marcasites, such buttons displaying a more generalized eye might adorn a waistcoat.16 Adolph Menzel (1815–1905) referred to the short-lived fashion for eye-buttons in an allegorical print that is part of a series of illustrations he created for a thirty-volume edition of the works of Frederick II the Great, initiated in 1843 (fig. 9). This satirical print was meant to accompany a poem titled Palladion, written by Frederick in 1749 and treating a precarious situation during the Silesian wars of the 1740s. Menzel’s sophisticated caricature shows Claude-Étienne Darget, then private secretary to the Marquis de Valory, French ambassador to the Prussian court gazing games ¦ 51

figure 9.  Adolph Menzel, illustration for Palladion, 1843. In Oeuvres de Fréderic le Grand, vol. 11, fig. 1.

in Berlin, standing in the center of the composition. Apparently, because he claimed to have made Frederick undefeatable, the ambassador credits himself with the recent Prussian victory over the Austrians by buttoning up the goddess of victory in his tailcoat, carelessly stuffing his pocket with one of her wings. This gesture, however, does not go unnoticed by Darget, who observes closely with more than one pair of eyes. Instead of buttons, his livery is covered with eyes that look through buttonholes as if peeping through keyholes. Darget later entered Frederick’s service as a Vorleser or reader, and he is said to have been his secret agent as well, a role Menzel’s print supports.17 I have not yet been able to identify the French miniaturist whom Walpole mentions, but he may have started out as one of these so-called button painters in Paris. He must have come to London only a couple of years before the French Revolution forced many French artists to relocate to England. Among them was miniature artist Georges-Antoine Keman de Sélestat, originally from Schlettstadt in Alsace. Though he cannot possibly have been the eye painter mentioned in the letter by Walpole, Kerman did create such portraits, as indicated by his Diarium, kept from 1784 to 1816. In 1802, during the height of the vogue for eye portraits, he was in 52 ¦ chapter  2

the fashionable city of Bath, where he received the commission of two eye pictures from a Mr. and Mrs. Taylor, for which he charged £2 2s.18 Records show that entire families had their eyes painted. Engleheart’s Fee-Book reveals, for instance, that eyes were painted of at least eight members of one Beauchamp family in 1804.19 An entry from 1798 lists pictures of the eyes of a Mrs., Mr., and Miss Metcalf. A record from about two years later that likely concerns the same Mrs. Metcalf reads: “Mrs. Metcalf, her eyes.” Remarkably, Engleheart lists here the plural (“eyes”) instead of the singular. Engleheart may have painted two or three duplicates of one of Mrs. Metcalf ’s eyes, but there is also the possibility that he rendered a miniature consisting of a rectangular strip showing Mrs. Metcalf ’s two eyes staring out. Though rare, such examples exist (see fig. 10).20 It remains unclear how the portraits were distributed among various family members. In this regard, a unique enterprise is the ocular family portrait presented by Queen Louisa of Prussia to her husband, King Friedrich Wilhelm III, on his birthday in August 1802 (fig. 11). Unlike earlier eye pictures, this is a pencil drawing set in a rather large oval frame. Clockwise from the top we have the queen’s eye, followed by those of Wilhelm IV, baby Prince Karl, Princess Charlotte, and the eldest son, Crown Prince Friedrich.21 A relatively late yet exquisite example of royal eye pictures is the ocular portrait of the daughter resulting from the ill-fitting match between Princess Caroline and George, Prince of Wales: Princess Charlotte, who died in childbirth in 1817 (fig. 12).22

figure 10.  Anonymous, eye miniature, ca. 1800. Museum of Fine Art, Boston.

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figure 11.  Anonymous, Ocular Family Portrait of Queen Louisa of Prussia and Four of Her Children, 1802. Pencil drawing on card. Stiftung Preussische Schlösser und Gärten, Berlin-Brandenburg.

figure 12.  Charlotte Jones, The Eye of Princess Charlotte, ca. 1817. Watercolor on ivory set on hair. Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, on loan from a private collection.

One way that several eye pictures could be worn was on a watch fob, such as an example in the Cincinnati Art Museum (fig. 13). Dated circa 1830, five eye portraits incorporated in charms such as a shell and a Bible are suspended from a watch fob, which includes a miniature model of the first modern steam locomotive, a reticulated fish, a tiny vase, and two watch keys.23 That they were mounted in the charms at a later date suggests that the eye portrait had ceased to be a stylish accessory even before the 1830s.24 It was definitely passé by 1848, if we are to believe Charles Dickens.25 In his novel Dombey and Son, a “fishy old eye” worn by Miss Tox in “the barrenest of lockets” is an emblem of the spinster’s plainness and limited independence. The eye is that of her deceased uncle, apparently an icon of a bygone era, as shown by his wearing a wig with a pigtail in a miniature portrait.26 Though no longer in fashion by the mid-nineteenth century, eye portraits had not quite vanished from view, at least not in royal circles. A last gasp, or perhaps the first emergence of these trinkets’ Nachleben or afterlife occurred in relation to Queen Victoria and her extensive family circle, gazing games ¦ 55

figure 13.  Watch fob with eye portraits, ca. 1830. Pinchbeck metal with agate, wood, enamel, and watercolor on ivory. Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati.

who were spread all over Europe. Developing a fondness for old-fashioned mourning jewelry after her beloved Albert’s death, Victoria commissioned her court miniaturist, Sir William Ross, to execute several portraits of eyes of her relatives in the 1840s and 1850s that are currently in the Royal Collection. In a journal entry dated November 20, 1857, Victoria recounts a visit to the Duke of Nemours, whose wife, Victoire, a cousin of the queen, had recently died in childbirth. The queen writes that she took Nemours aside to give him “a copy of the miniature of her [Victoire’s] dear eye (the original is mine), he having lost his, also a photography of a profile I did of dear Victoire in 39, which he though, (as I really think it is) very like” (italics in original).27 The original eye portrait of Victoire of Nemours to which Queen Victoria refers is probably identical to the picture done by Sir William Ross, who charged six pounds and six shillings for it in 1843. Around 56 ¦ chapter  2

figure 14.  Sir William Ross, Eye Portrait of Feodora, Princess of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, 1843. Watercolor on ivory. Royal Collection, Windsor Castle.

the same time, Ross also rendered an eye portrait of Victoria’s half-sister Feodora, Princess of Hohenlohe-Langenburg (1807–72), for the same price (fig. 14).28 The passage in Victoria’s journal demonstrates that it was common, at least until the mid-nineteenth century, to have copies made either of one’s own eye or someone else’s to present as gifts to loved ones. Along with the miniature eyes attributed to Ross at Windsor Castle, the court miniaturist is likely to have rendered ocular portraits of several other of the queen’s family members, for instance the Duke and Duchess d’Aumale (fig. 15). Their eyes are currently housed at the Aumales’ former residence, the Château de Chantilly (now the site of the Musée Condé), just outside Paris.29 The eyes of the duchess and her mother are set in lockets along with locks of hair inserted under glass, whereas the eyes of d’Aumale and his brother, the Prince of Joinville, had originally been surrounded with diamonds and mounted in the middle of golden bracelets.30 Comparing her eye portrait with a large miniature of the Duchess d’Aumale and two of her sons that Ross was engaged in painting in 1855 (fig. 16) shows that it is highly likely that he fashioned not only the duchess’s eye but also those of her mother, the Duc d’Aumale, and his brother. These eyes could have been executed either in 1855, while he was working on the large miniature of the duchess and her children, or two years later, gazing games ¦ 57

figure 15.  Sir William Ross (attr.), Eye Portrait of the Duke d’Aumale and Eye Portrait of the Duchess d’Aumale, ca. 1855. Watercolor on ivory. Musée Condé, Chantilly. figure 16.  Sir William Ross, The Duchess d’Aumale, 1855. Enamel. Royal Collection, Windsor Castle.

when he completed a portrait of the duke and duchess, right before he suffered what was probably a stroke.31 The queen’s sudden interest in this bygone vogue may have inspired Lady Augusta Holland to commission a portrait of her eye to be set in the mantelpiece of the yellow drawing room in Holland House in London in the early 1840s. Apparently Lady Augusta’s eyes were unequal in size, something not shown in the charming portraits that G. F. Watts, a painter to whom she was particularly attached, made of her.32 As the story goes, Lady Augusta made sure to have a portrait of the better of her two eyes set in the mantelpiece. The eye, larger than life-size, recalls the all-seeing eye of God looking down from an Italian church’s cupola of the sort she had observed on her many travels, rather than a small jewel, raising the question of to what extent we should still see this as a portrait in line with the eye miniatures I am discussing here. Having seen it in situ before Holland House was destroyed during a World War II air raid, Williamson mentions its uncanny effect on the viewer: indeed, it was hardly possible to avoid it while one was in the room. He attributes it to Watts, who certainly would have had plenty of opportunities to paint it while making his several portraits of Lady Augusta.33 Lady Augusta’s monumental eye picture was in fact a present to her husband Henry, fourth Baron of Holland, and was intended to be a way of watching over him while she was away. When she arranged for this unusual portrait to be cleaned, she wrote to her husband in 1843: “I think the only time [suitable] is while you are away, as a keen look out is useless in the little green room when the master has decamped.” In a reply, Henry playfully complained about his wife’s apparent wish to have her eye portrait copied: “I should be sorry if your eye was to be multiplied to look at dozens of your friends and acquaintances. It much loses its value in my eyes, and takes off the pleasure of possessing it.”34 It remains unclear whether Henry succeeded in persuading his wife not to reproduce the lookout. Williamson’s passion for ocular miniature portraits eventually prompted a modest revival of this marginal category of portraiture when he organized an exhibition of eye pictures in the Dowdeswell Galleries in London in 1905. In a short preface to the catalog, Williamson introduces miniaturist Alyn Williams as having successfully revived the bygone fashion by creating eye portraits that rival, he claims, those made by Cosway and Engleheart. The catalog shows that Williams painted the eyes of various contemporaries, including King Edward VII (apparently immediately recognized by Queen Alexandra when visiting the show) and three of Williamson’s children. In addition to creating an ocular self-portrait, Williams gazing games ¦ 59

painted the eye of the great connoisseur himself, an image that was set in a ring. Though the Dowdeswell show was the first to exclusively show eye portraits (in the first part of its exhibition; the second part consisted of Williams’s portrait miniatures), such items had been on public display figure 17.  Richard Earlom, after Charles Brandoin, Royal Academy Exhibition, 1771. Mezzotint. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, New Haven.

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before, at least on a couple of occasions. However, whereas regular miniature portraits were displayed among the larger oil paintings in the annual Royal Academy exhibitions—as demonstrated by the famous depiction of Earlom (fig. 17)—eye miniatures were shown in public only occasionally. For instance, a duplicate of Mrs. Fitzherbert’s eye (currently in the Royal Collection, Buckingham Palace, London), probably still housed in

its original fish-skin case, was shown in 1889 at the Burlington Fine Arts Club.35 After their initial vogue in Britain, the fashion for eye pictures slowly spread in the following decades to the cosmopolitan capitals and aristocratic courts of Europe and eventually reached the United States. In Germany, Gerhard von Kügelgen (1772–1820) is known to have painted an eye self-portrait on the reverse side of a miniature portrait of Wilhelm Johann Zoege von Mantueffel (fig. 18).36 His pupil Carolina Badura received a commission to create a prototypical eye of Princess Christine von Schwarzburg-Sondershausen. She made various duplicates after this model-eye for the princess to give to her family members.37 Apparently figure 18.  Gerhard von Kügelgen, Eye Self Portrait, reverse of Portrait of Wilhelm Johann Zoege von Mantueffel, ca. 1800. Watercolor on ivory. Private collection.

Empress Marie Louise, the second wife of Napoleon, possessed several eye miniatures.38 In the United States, Edward Malbone (1777–1807) was reputed to have painted eyes. The eye of Maria Miles Heyward, rendered around 1802, is the only example that has ever been located.39 Attribution in general is highly problematic, because these artists hardly ever signed their tiny creations.40

gazing games ¦ 61

Why, we might ask, was the fashion for eye portraits so short-lived? (Let’s leave aside the fondness for the genre expressed by Queen Victoria and her circle.) And to what extent is the eye portrait related to the long tradition of eye iconography? Without repeating here the visual etymology of the eye as symbol, I would like to remark upon the eye portrait’s sudden emergence in light of the changing meaning of single-eye representations as symbols in the last decades of the eighteenth century. Before attempting to explain the (social) role and meaning of eye portraits in the late eighteenth century, I will outline the course of the single eye as a symbol that became secularized in the course of the Enlightenment: the all-seeing eye of God was transformed into the supreme eye of reason. If eye portraits indeed mark a knot in vision’s history, as I have stated in the introduction, we might as well start unraveling it here, as we see how alongside it the single eye qua symbol was about to embark on a new life as an emblem of the French Revolution, a vision as unifying as it was centralized.

Unraveling the Knot: The Secularization of the Eye Figure 19 shows a rather unusual miniature dating back to the late 1780s (National Gallery of Ireland). Set in a circular wooden cabinet frame, the ivory support features a small, black, male figure resting on one knee holding his hands up as if he were begging. Darkened, almost as if in silhouette, the figure bears a chain of shackles running from his wrists to his ankle. In the background is a seascape with two slave ships to the figure’s left and right. The blue sky is framed by the text “Am I not a Man and a Brother.”41 In the center of the bright sky, a tiny eye, like a small sun, looks out upon the scene. This miniature’s composition is based on a ceramic cameo that Joshua Wedgwood designed for the Society of the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787. Worn as antislavery badges by abolitionists and their supporters, medals and medallions based on Wedgwood’s design were set into metal mounts, bracelets, or snuffboxes, and quite to everyone’s surprise, “the taste for wearing them became general, and thus a fashion, which usually confines itself to worthless things, was seen for once in the honourable office of promoting the cause of justice, humanity and freedom,” as one contemporary observed.42 If we compare Wedgwood’s original cameo with this ivory miniature, the most prominent difference is the addition of the eye that hovers specklike in the sky. It has been pointed out that the tiny eye is symbolic of God’s all-seeing power and omnipresence; this sort of eye was most famously 62 ¦ chapter  2

figure 19.  Abolition medallion, ca. 1780. Ivory. National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.

portrayed around that time in Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki’s Das Auge der Vorshehung (1787), a work in which the eye, set in a triangular frame, is illuminated from behind by rays of light (fig. 20).43 Whereas such an association could have been intended by the miniaturist, this eye also recalls the supreme eye of reason that out of its small triangle frame shines over the famous color print of the Declaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen as approved by the Assembly of France in 1789 (fig. 21). Seated on the architrave on the left side is the personification of La France, who has just broken her chains, accompanied on the right by Law, whose finger points down to the Rights of Man while her scepter points up to the eye in the sky, light shining from behind its triangular frame. Whereas the ear has often been associated with obedience, the eye on the slave medallion and the human rights plate relates to freedom—embodying a new, unrestricted Weltanschauung seeking to overcome fixed horizons. The abolitionist medallion demonstrates that the eye symbol, rather than representing a gradual secularization, is subjected to a condensation of various layers of its rich visual etymology. In fact, the medallion’s eye reveals the symbol’s tenacity and longevity—its astonishing flexibility to absorb shifting meanings and ideas. The all-seeing eye of God, looking down upon his people with equal care (and scrutiny) toward all, fuses with the Enlightenment’s supreme eye of reason. Elements such as a scepter or a throne accompanying an eye are included in traditions reaching back thousands of years; the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for the god gazing games ¦ 63

Osiris consisted of a throne, a scepter, and an eye. The triangular frame surrounding most of these revolutionary eyes evoke associations with the carpenter’s level as an attribute of the figure of Equality, even if, as Ernst Gombrich explains, it was probably handed down by the Freemasons.44 The eye topping the pyramid on the American dollar bill is another instance in which Egyptian mythology is mixed up with Freemasonry and figure 20.  Daniel Chodowiecki, Das Auge der Vorsehung, ca. 1787. Print. figure 21.  Declaration of the Rights of Man, 1789. Colored print. Musée Carnavalet, Paris.

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eighteenth-century revolutionary symbolism. One wonders, however, whether these references were on Chodowiecki’s mind when he crafted his Auge der Vorsehung, an image commissioned by a certain Thomas Grem showing the Masonic brotherhood’s honoring of God via an illustration of a prayer that was printed and distributed to members of the order.45 The printed version was accompanied by a motto reading “Gott sieht und versorget” and “Gott sieht und wird versorgen” (“God sees and cares” and “God sees and is cared for”).

An eye set in a triangular frame similar to Chodowiecki’s had been used throughout the eighteenth century in portraits of monarchs. For instance, in a portrait of Juliana Maria, Queen of Denmark (1729–96), by J. E. Nilson (1721–88), a German-born engraver for the English royal family (fig. 22), we see a female Reason carrying a disembodied eye in a triangular frame on a wooden pole.46 Interestingly, the eye is no longer in the sky but has descended to fuse with the scepter and has thus become portable. Raised aloft on a stick, the universal sign now allows a singular application. An allegorical portrait of George III by Robert Bowyer shows the king within a laurel-wreath border, lit by a bright, shining eye whose light dispels the dark clouds of dysfunctional government (fig. 23). Here the eye of enlightenment leaves room for God’s gaze of authority and surveillance to merge with the stare of the sovereign. Evidently, gazes of both God and king are sovereign in the sense that they cannot be held accountable and do not await a response. The sovereign gaze is a one-sided, top-down vision, confronting subjects that do not confront it in return.

figure 22.  J. E. Nilson, Juliana Maria, Queen of Denmark (1729–1796), ca. 1760. Print. Royal Collection, Windsor Castle.

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figure 23.  Robert Bowyer, George III, after 1789. Engraving by Fittler. Royal Collection, Windsor Castle.

Probably the best-known instance in which sovereignty, surveillance, supervision, and (divine) omnivoyance are conflated and signified by disembodied eyes was created long before the Enlightenment. In the “Rainbow Portrait” (fig. 24, ca. 1600–1603, attributed to Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger), Queen Elizabeth I is wearing a heavy cloak that partly covers her dress. The bodice of the dress has been extensively embroidered with flowers, signifying fertility, which are paired with a conspicuous snake adorning her sleeve, which stands for Intelligenzia. A loose-fitting cloak enabled this artist to add yet another layer of symbolism when he scattered over it numerous eyes and ears. This trope, borrowed from Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (1593), makes the queen appear as the Ragione di stato or Reason of State, who explicates how she will respond wisely and cautiously in the state’s interest to all she sees and hears (fig. 25).47 Another figure in Ripa’s emblem book whose garment is embellished with eyes and ears is Gelosia, 66 ¦ chapter  2

or Jealousie, who sees and hears even the smallest intimation concerning her lover—an image particularly apt for the Virgin Queen, who famously had married her beloved England (fig. 26).48 It comes as no surprise that Robespierre (and others such as Fabre d’Églantine), crafting new ideals of the French Revolution using visual terms, emblems, symbols, and allegories, deployed the single eye and drew on its rich etymology for their own aims. Starting from the idea, widespread during the Revolution, that people think in images—it was believed that abstract ideas derive from pictures rather than words—they cannily understood the impact of traditional symbols as a way of consecrating a new ideology.49 The age-old symbol of the eye, one that had already gained

figure 24.  Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (attr.), Elizabeth I, the Rainbow Portrait, ca. 1600–1603. Oil on panel. Hatfield House, Hertfordshire.

gazing games ¦ 67

figure 25.  Cesare Ripa, “Reason of State,” from Iconologia, English reprint, eighteenth century.

a fresh meaning in the age of Enlightenment as a figure of truth and in-

figure 26.  Cesare Ripa, “Jealousie,” from Iconologia, English reprint, eighteenth century.

an essay on Robespierrian ocular symbolism, the eye of the Revolution is

sight, did not miss its goals. It stood for the female personification of Reason, who carries it on a stick as a trophy, as did the figure of prosperity in the portrait of Danish queen Juliana Maria.50 As Klaus Herding observes in an example par excellence of the conflict confronting Robespierre and his fellow propagandists: the renunciation of the magical meaning of sacred symbols following the Enlightenment versus the sociopolitical necessity of a dazzling spectacle to help legitimate the establishment of a new people, a new nation, and a new calendar.51 Indeed, the eye shining over the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789 had not fused with but replaced the all-seeing divinity; however, it eerily anticipates notions of supervision, surveillance, and terror that it would soon represent. Though not published until 1804, C. N. Ledoux’s famous Eye Reflecting the Interior of the Theater of Besançon of about 1790 represents the more liberating side of the now fundamentally polysemical eye. Ledoux imbues the all-seeing eye with the revolutionary idea of equal sight for all, depicted in a two-way vision that is enabled simultaneously by the theater and the organ. What Ledoux wishes to stress is not the spectacle seen on the stage but rather the position and operation from which viewing is made

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possible (in Greek called theatron). His picture emphasizes that a switch from the stage to the viewing position brings about the paradigm shift entailed by revolutionary ideals. The spotlight, originating behind the pupil and seemingly falling outside the eye, shines the message forth. In France throughout the years of the Revolution, the disembodied eye continued to take on slightly different meanings in relation to different objectives, as is demonstrated by various images. For example, a copper badge engraved by Nicolas Marie Gatteaux for vendors of prints and pamphlets, dated 1789, shows an eye set in a closely cropped circle, surrounded by rays of light, and framed by the motto “La publicité est la sauve-garde du peuple” (Free debate is the people’s safeguard).52 Yet in a departure from its previous connotations of pure insight, Reason will soon “arm” itself with the eye of authority. An obvious symbol of freedom, the eye thus becomes an image of surveillance, warning of possible penalties, and as such it stands in sharp contrast to the intimacy evoked by the eye in miniatures. Still positioned in its corona via the light of reason, it begins to grace passports and other documents, watching out for those who do not endorse the Revolution’s enlightened messages. Herding states that the revolutionary eye’s signification oscillates between something purely rational and something religious and magical, two dialectical poles that were quite prolific in producing meaning precisely because their oppositional tension remained unresolved. Taking a different stance from Herding’s, Gombrich describes how all these various connotations actually fuse in the new trinity of Liberty, Equality, and Reason that became part of the cult of the Supreme Being. Framed by the triangle, this newly forged trinity was sanctioned by mystery, which the crafters of the imagery of the Revolution very much intended. As we can now see, in the abolitionist medallion the addition of the eye in the sky to Wedgwood’s original design is in tune with the intellectual ideas of the time. This tiny speck of paint merges notions of Reason’s and Divinity’s all-seeing eye, as well as ideas of equality, human rights, freedom, and enlightened reflection emphasized in the question “Am I not a Man and a Brother?” To what extent did the eye portrait fit into this resuscitation of a most persistent iconographical sign? Although the abolitionist medallion could be worn as a brooch or badge or be carried in a snuffbox’s lid’s setting, just as one did with an eye picture, I believe that no proper connection can be established between the successful revolutionary symbol and the eye miniature. In fact, eye pictures confront art historians with a special methodological quandary.53 If we attempt to place eye miniatures in the iconogazing games ¦ 69

graphic tradition, for instance in the context of late-eighteenth-century ocular symbolism, or to see them as precursors of late-nineteenth-century or surrealist depictions of eyes, as Schmidt-Burkhardt has convincingly done, we largely ignore the particularity of these images, which in most cases were commissioned as gifts for specific individuals.54 Naturally partaking in the history of single-eye representation, their miniature variant, rooted in portraiture, transcends the realm of symbolism and is opposed to notions of universal, all-encompassing sight. Differing from the disembodied eye that can refer to the all-seeing God, Freemasonry, or Enlightenment, eye miniatures are not just symbols; rather, they are portraits.55 As we have seen in the previous chapter, they may seem hyperbolic, an excessive or intensified version of regular miniatures, rather than being exemplary images of reason. Indeed, the intimacy they entail may well be the exact opposite of the surveillance embodied by the revolutionary eye. Their meaning, therefore, is not locatable within iconography but seems to reside elsewhere. My aim is to locate that “elsewhere” in the eye portrait’s reciprocal dynamic with its viewer, or, to put it more precisely, in its fusion of image and beholder, representation and agent of vision. If, for a moment, we consider eye portraits as cultural symptoms in Marjorie Garber’s sense of the phrase, we may be able to find a pathway directing us away from iconography and toward alternative territories. In her introduction to Symptoms of Culture (1998), Garber redefines some of Erwin Panofsky’s famous propositions in contemporary terms. Panofsky stated that iconology deals with a work of art as a symptom of “something else”; the task of art history is to interpret these “symbolic values” unknown to the artwork’s maker.56 Garber actually considers the notion of cultural symptom to be diametrically opposed to the notion of the symbol. Whereas the symbol can be characterized by its power to universalize the particular or eternalize the general, for Garber the symptom—initially a medical term denoting that which accidentally “falls together”—may reveal, in the specificity and oddity of the particular, a clue to the fantasies of the general. It is in this light that I would like to view eye portraits for now: as a cultural symptom, a peculiarity, even a bizarre outgrowth, a phenomenon that after its brief vogue vanished completely from the (art-)historical picture. In that respect, they have been acting as “vanishing mediators,” a term I borrow from Hegel in reference to a shift in the history of vision, without the larger metaphysical weight he assigns to the term.57 As symptoms, eye portraits may be quite telling regarding a general preoccupation, if not of their beholders or their owners, then of the wider culture that pro70 ¦ chapter  2

duced them: a preoccupation, obviously, with gazing, or rather with battling against the gaze. The battle with the gaze turns out to be a battle with the self, during which subject and object constantly change positions. The subject of looking transforms into the object of sight even as, all the while, the gaze as the irreducible quality of the subject turns into an object. We will see that one thing eye portraits offer us is a rather unusual, and therefore quite refreshing, perspective that transgresses the separation between subject and object of sight to fuse the passive and active sides of the visual. Before speculating about the cultural fantasies hinted at by eye portraits, I will try to firmly place them in the historical context that produced them by returning to a consideration of their role and function in the relation between the Prince of Wales and Mrs. Fitzherbert.

Strategies of Showing: Carrying the Eye Shortly after Mrs. Fitzherbert’s return to London in December 1785, aristocratic circles were abuzz with speculation about whether the couple had married. The couple’s behavior at the opera, where they were often seen together, had indicated that the terms of their relationship had changed. But there was something else. In a letter to her daughter, the Duchess of Devonshire, dated February 6, 1786, Lady Spencer writes that the couple has surely wed, because the prince possesses an eye portrait of Mrs. Fitzherbert: “Why does [Mrs. Fitzherbert] change from a very prudent behavior about [the prince] to a very imprudent one, suffering him to sit and talk to her all the Opera, to carry her picture (or her eye), which is the same thing, about and shew it to people. . . . All these things put it past a doubt that they are married.”58 According to Lady Spencer, the eye of Mrs. Fitzherbert as much as her portrait functions not merely as a token of love but as proof of marriage, like a wedding ring. Williamson suggested that Cosway’s eye picture was initially set in a bracelet that Mrs. Fitzherbert had presented as a gift to her prince.59 This account contradicts Lady’s Spencer’s description that the prince carried Mrs. Fitzherbert’s picture or her eye picture and also showed it to people. If the eye miniature Lady Spencer refers to is identical to the one in plate 11, it is mounted in a locket.60 Showing the eye to people at the opera, then, involved unclasping the locket to present what was concealed inside. In fact, by opening the locket, the prince revealed not only Mrs. Fitzherbert’s eye but also her status as his wife. The prince likely learned how to deploy miniature pictures publicly from his mother. The queen had herself portrayed numerous times weargazing games ¦ 71

ing a miniature portrait by Jeremy Meyer of her husband, King George III, that was mounted on a pearl bracelet and given to her as an engagement present. The queen also wore or pinned the miniature over her heart. Her public loyalty, required by her position, was thus sentimentalized and given an aura of intimacy.61 As a result, the wearing of miniatures as a gesture of loyalty became the fashion among women of quality from the middle of the eighteenth century onward.62 But public wearing of miniatures on the person was strictly gendered. Women might display portraits of men on their bodies, yet men could not do so without a perceived loss of masculinity.63 If a man wore a miniature portrait of his beloved, he carried it concealed beneath his clothes. Famously, a miniature of Lady Hamilton was found on Nelson’s corpse after the battle of Trafalgar.64 The notorious couple also exchanged eye pictures.65 The prince may have made quite a spectacle at the opera, subverting gender norms by carrying Mrs. Fitzherbert’s eye on his person in public. It remains difficult to say, however, whether the habit of wearing eye pictures was different from the custom of wearing portrait miniatures taken up by men and women of fashion. Unfortunately, Lady Eleanor does not mention in her diary whether the eye mounted in a ring brought by her friend from Paris was actually worn by him or had been intended as a gift for someone else. Eye pictures mounted in brooches or pins could have been attached as easily to cravats or (the inside of) lapels as to fichus or the rim of décolletés, or hung from ribbons under the neckline of a dress. Setting aside for the moment whether the prince acted in an unmanly fashion by walking around with a locket dangling from his bracelet, or by holding it in his hand, he obviously regarded Mrs. Fitzherbert’s eye picture as more than merely a personal keepsake. Moreover, its exposure became a clue to their secret marriage. We may say that in the moment of such revelation the meaning of the eye portrait shifted from the mimetic to the symbolic register, becoming “evidence” (derived etymologically from videre, to see) of the secret marriage in the word’s most literal sense as an eye bearing witness, so to speak. The prince even employed it as a trump card in an intricate duel with his father over the Royal Marriage Act, waging his battles at the opera, where the lorgnettes and opera glasses of the entire London beau monde were directed toward him. In this respect we see how the rise of eye miniatures as a trend is symptomatic of an upper-class culture preoccupied with a kind of looking that marked but simultaneously transgressed or even violated the borders separating the private from the public.

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For the prince, the opera box was an excellent site to play out his caprices. The theater lobby and the opera box were parts of an arena where attendees watched and were watched by one another, as we know well from hilarious drawings by Thomas Rowlandson (fig. 27). Writing about Geneva, Rousseau, in his Letter to D’Alembert (1758), describes the theater as a space where society itself is staged as a kind of performance, where ladies pretending to be watching the stage from their boxes were exposed as an attraction for other members of the audience. Spectators became part of the entertainment, moving around as if they were actors.66 Theater figure 27.  Thomas Rowlandson, The Side Box at the Opera, 1785. Watercolor and black ink over graphite on cream paper. Harvard Art Museum / Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA.

boxes could also establish a zone of intimacy, as described, for instance, in Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons when Cécile de Volange is pleased to speak privately with the Marquise de Merteuil in her opera box without running the risk of being overheard.67 This potential fusion of seemingly opposed public and private spheres in the opera box runs parallel to the way the prince staged the opening of his

gazing games ¦ 73

locket. Stewart’s understanding of the theatricality of the miniature could not have found a better example than the behavior of the Prince of Wales in his opera box. Unable to enter the public sphere as explicitly declared husband and wife, the couple used the box as their podium to announce to the audience that in their private life they were actually married. In fact, their secret marriage was never hidden from view; it was made visible to everyone present through the display of Mrs. Fitzherbert’s eye. In her brilliant essay on portrait miniatures, Pointon explains how the regular miniature portrait as a transitory object functions as a prerequisite to the gazing games linking public and private spaces in an interplay between separateness and union of the beholder and the portrayed. The sudden popularity of Wheatley’s images of young women (or men) privately gazing at miniatures demonstrates how the portrait-object assists in staging such an oscillation between self and other with a clear sense of self-consciousness (see fig. 3 above). She suggests that eye portraits were also part of this gazing game: “Miniatures in which the eye and its immediate surroundings, together with a lock of hair, stand metonymically for the whole face of the looked at are devices within, and further material evidence of, the game of fixed and self-conscious looking. The gaze is, in other words, a socialized manner of seeing.”68 The behavior of the Prince of Wales demonstrates that eye portraits were used in games of looking, yet as discussed in the previous chapter, their position within the social network of seeing was fundamentally different from that of portrait miniatures. Taking the miniaturist’s exclusive focus on eyes as a confirmation of how gazing games revolved around portrait miniatures, Pointon considers the eye portrait to be a condensed form of the miniature. Pace Pointon, I would suggest that the painted eye, as it is not a synecdoche, does not metonymically represent the whole face; that is, it does not stand in for a loved one’s face, not even for his or her eye. Rather, it stands in for his or her gaze. As a portrayal of a gaze rather than part of a face, the eye picture adds a significant aspect to the network of gazing games that remains unaddressed in studies of portrait miniatures—namely, how the beholder could be subjected to someone’s gaze in the sense that she or he becomes a “sight.” As such, an eye picture will always fail to make its sitter present the way a miniature portrait could. The trope in painting of presenting an absent or deceased family member by means of his or her portrait could not be adopted in eye miniatures (and in the next chapter we will see how eye portraits of deceased loved ones further complicate their status as images). The portrait and the eye miniature occupy entirely different positions in mimetic and symbolic registers. Having abandoned nearly all mimetic 74 ¦ chapter  2

qualities with regard to the sitter by its exclusive focus on the gaze, an eye picture is not only an object but also a subject of contemplation. The way in which eye portraits are framed serves to enhance this reversal of contemplation.

Strategies of Seeing: Framing the Eye [I]t must engage [the female sex] to have a perpetual Watch upon their Eyes, and to remember that one careless Glance gives more Advantage than a hundred Words not enough considered; the Language of the Eyes being very much the most significant and the most observed. —The Whole Duty of a Woman: or an infallible guide to the fair sex . . . (1737) As we have seen, eye portraits came in a great variety of settings in boxes, albums, and jewels. The latter ones, which were supposedly worn on the body, often involved decorative frames made of gold and encrusted with pearls or other precious stones that transform the tiny painting into a jewel. A fusion of monetary and sentimental value makes a gold snuffbox adorned with a king’s portrait a perfect gift for a faithful subject. In contrast, the elaborate frames in which eye portraits are often set seem to compensate for the simplicity of the representation. The imbalance between the lavish frame and its humble content is telling, in particular when we compare the frames in which eyes are set to those of eyeglasses. Eyeglasses assisted impaired vision but were also adopted as stylish accessories by men and women of fashion. Often worn by sitters, the eyeglass is frequently featured in (miniature) portraits alongside the letter and the portrait miniature. Apparently, visitors to painting exhibitions often brought eyeglasses, as we see for instance in an engraving by Martini after Ramberg’s well-known picture of the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1787 (fig. 28). Near the miniature section—where a woman holds up a child, pointing to one of the miniatures as if in a moment of jubilant recognition—a man attempts to study a portrait hung quite high on the wall. With his left hand he holds up an eyeglass, adjusting it in order to properly focus on the object.69 Although sometimes slightly larger in size, the frames of eyeglasses are similar if not identical to those in which eye pictures are set (fig. 29). The device’s many names—it was also called a perspective-, quizzing-, and spy-glass—indicate particular instances of looking. Clearly, the eyeglass precludes surreptitious glances. We can imagine Princess Sophia in Anne Mee’s miniature (fig. 30) “setting an eye” on you while peering through the gazing games ¦ 75

figure 28.  P. A. Martini, after H. Ramberg, The Royal Academy Exhibition of 1787, 1787. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. figure 29.  Various eyeglasses, late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. figure 30.  Anne Mee, Princess Sophia, ca. 1790. Watercolor on ivory. Royal Collection, Windsor Castle.

glass to look you up and down. Lifting the glass to the eye was a performative gesture, equivalent to stating “I look” or even “I spy.” Indeed, we can imagine that the man holding the eyeglass in Martini’s engraving (fig. 28) is pretending to scrutinize a portrait while in fact slowly turning his gaze to the figures standing nearby so as to spy on them. This sort of voyeurism was depicted by Richard Earlom in a mezzotint of the annual art exhibition at the Royal Academy a few years earlier (see fig. 17 above). In the center of the stagelike box of the exhibition room, we see a man holding an eyeglass to his eye, shamelessly observing the woman at his side. The woman, however, is not completely defenseless, as she holds up a fan to shield her face from his gaze. She may well aspire to “spy back” through the openwork of the ribs of her fan, or she might have wished for a fan incorporating a mask or spectacles especially designed for this purpose, as it was deemed inappropriate for a woman to directly return a male gaze.70 In Rowlandson’s drawing (fig. 27 above) we see a gentleman ogling a nearby lady. It is unlikely that the lady would be oblivious to that kind of attention, yet it appears that she does not take offense. gazing games ¦ 77

Can we conclude that such behavior was tolerated in certain spaces where vision on a communicative level was celebrated, such as the theater and the exhibition room? Observing similar habits in Paris, Louis Sébastien Mercier wrote in his Tableau de Paris (published in Amsterdam between 1782 and 1788): “Paris is full of merciless oglers who place themselves in front of you and fix on you their bold, staring eyes. This custom is no longer considered indecent because it is so commonplace. Women don’t take offence provided it happens at the theater or along the promenades. . . Excellent eyes pretend to be imperfect in order to use a useless instrument which is more often than not an affectation.”71 Though it had previously been considered indecent, the practice of ogling through a spyglass had come to be relatively accepted as long as it took place in spaces designed for looking, showing, and showing off, such as theaters, lobbies, promenades, and exhibition rooms. In such spaces, networks of gazes mapped out the boundaries between proper and improper viewing that held in place the balance between accepted voyeurism, tolerated exhibitionism, and violation of privacy, as the images of Rowlandson and Ramberg confirm. The apparent legitimization in these public spaces of a kind of peeping, usually by a voyeur who took an intensely private pleasure in it, went hand in hand with the changing meaning of another kind of inquiry, curiosity. Getting the better of manners, curiosity (rather than mere voyeurism) seems to have been a driving force defining the etiquette around spyglasses. Whereas “to peep” or “to peek” had meant throwing an illicit glance, the practice gradually became generally accepted as a licentious indulgence. Such a shift in meaning is apparent in a plate from a series of costume books published by Thomas Jeffreys from 1757 to 1772. In the fourth and last volume of A collection of dresses of different nations, antient and modern [sic] . . . , Jeffreys closely follows Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia by including images of model masquerade dresses that supposedly represent vices, virtues, and passions. Among them is personified Curiosity, a winged female figure dressed in a cloak covered with eyes and ears, very similar to the one Queen Elizabeth I wore in the “Rainbow Portrait” (fig. 24 above) but having more frivolous connotations (fig. 31). The accompanying text explains how the eyes and ears serve as emblems of the figure’s “eagerness to see and hear.” Though Jeffreys took the figure straight from Ripa, he made some significant changes to her appearance, thereby shedding light on the changed conception of curiosity in England. Comparing Jeffreys’s Curiosity to Ripa’s, we see that the latter figure is clearly out of control: depicted as a woman obsessed with inquisitiveness, Ripa’s Curiosity has 78 ¦ chapter  2

figure 31.  “Curiosity,” from Thomas Jeffreys, A collection of dresses of different nations, antient and modern (London, published by Thomas Jeffreys, 1757– 72), 4:37, no. 235.

disheveled hair, outstretched arms, and a wild expression on her face. Her

figure 32.  Cesare Ripa, “Curiosity,” from Iconologia.

modern England tamed curiosity, Benedict argues, regulating the bound-

wings, standing for the fleetingness of fanciful thoughts, are spread out as if she were about to dash off to where the next piece of news has broken (fig. 32). In her book Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry, Barbara Benedict states that Jeffreys’s image marks a change in the cultural conception of curiosity over the course of the eighteenth century. Earlyless passion typified by Ripa’s image and transforming it into the eager, sophisticated, almost polite interest of an elegant young lady, as imagined by Jeffreys.72 Apart from Ragione di Stato, the other figure in Ripa’s emblem book who wears a garment adorned with eyes and ears is Gelosia or Jealousie, who uses all her inquisitiveness to catch her lover in adultery. These figures, each representing a different mode of scrutiny, can be paired up with various optical instruments that indicate various sorts of viewing. Whereas we can easily see Curiosity carrying a spyglass in an early modern Europe that has suddenly become preoccupied with vision, for Jealousie a gazing games ¦ 79

so-called jealousy glass—or lorgnette or lunette de jalousie—would be more apt. Paradoxically, the jealousy glass was also called a “decorum glass,” probably intentionally to soften its crude violation of social decency. It was a type of opera glass with a small plated mirror set at an angle such that “it is sufficient to turn this opening in the direction of whatever one wishes to observe, and the curiosity is immediately satisfied,” as a contemporary user wrote.73 The jealousy glass enabled an individual to discreetly follow another’s actions. Apparently, it was very convenient in allowing one to keep track of latecomers entering the opera without having to turn one’s head. According to one account, the great advantage of the “decorum glass” was precisely its decorum: “this glass satisfies the curiosity without impoliteness [and] from this point of view it is very convenient to use.”74 What these devices ultimately provide for us is evidence of the strong desire to see more than is available to the unaided eye. Looking with a device in hand is as excessive as it is transgressive. When we juxtapose the eye portraits to spyglasses, we see that most of them are set in surprisingly similar frames. Indeed, the painted eye appears to be peeping through a glass during a moment of intense scrutiny. The comparison between eyeglasses and eye pictures shows that as a portrayal of the gaze, painted eyes do in fact participate in the game of looking that Pointon describes, yet not as the object of contemplation but as its subject. The exchange of looks becomes so intensified in eye pictures that the image stares at the viewer rather than the other way around. Under the gaze of the painted eye, it is the beholder who is being watched. The image embodies the flash of a gaze in a moment of reciprocity. We may even say that the initiative for returning the beholder’s gaze resides in the image. By peering outward—the only act that occurs in these paintings—the tiny eye requires the beholder to subject himself or herself to the painted gaze. With the normative viewing direction thus reversed, how should we position these tiny depictions of sight as interventions in the context of gazing games, of developments in the conception and understanding of looking? An eye picture’s zoom-in on an intent stare may be symptomatic not of ogling in general but of its gradual social acceptance. If there is such a thing as the taming of curiosity, as Benedict has posited, once improper forms of passionate studying, when depicted and framed as jewels to be offered as gifts, seem to be domesticated, if not cultivated. It is not a mere eye but an ogling gaze that must have been a comforting rather than distressing image to its beholders—when they were thus ogled by someone familiar and close. 80 ¦ chapter  2

However, two problems need solving before such a statement can be confirmed. First, if an “ogling” gaze stares at its beholder in eye pictures, we cannot term such a gaze voyeuristic. Because the gaze looks out at a particular “you” and the beholder is clearly complicit in this one-to-one gazing, the mise-en-scène for ogling is quite different from the public space of theater lobby or exhibition room that we have considered so far. Second, in those spaces the ogling gaze is first and foremost a male gaze— and yet of the surviving eyes I have been able to trace, female eyes greatly outnumber male ones. In light of the notion of gazing games and Benedict’s idea of curiosity being tamed, what does it mean that there are far more female than male eyes portrayed as if they were staring through a spyglass? Within the tradition of gift giving in which regular miniatures participated, eye portraits were exchanged between lovers, friends, and family members and are said to have been a typically “female” present. Would a male recipient be the owner of such a portrayed female gaze, or would the female gaze looking out at the gift’s male recipient in fact possess him? Could we perhaps see this as a subversive instance of the eye miniature’s reversal not only of conventional subject-object positions but also of the traditional positions occupied by the male gaze as subject and the female body as object? Would such small, fashionable trinkets, quite marginal within portraiture (or within daily life, for that matter), allow this? Indeed the prince may have acted unmanly by showing around Mrs. Fitzherbert’s eye, but that does not explain why her behavior (as Lady Spencer characterized it) was seen as imprudent. What the performance around the prince’s eye miniature reveals are the sexualized positions of the object and subject of seeing in light of the—gendered—habits of particular modes of looking: ogling as male, curiosity as female. Obviously, there are two sexes of sight, but as we will see, eye portraits may be able to combine the activity and passivity of each in a single object, as a complete verb, so to speak.

“More than Ordinary Penetration in Seeing” Many jokes and caricatures ridicule the variety of available opera glasses, their telling names, and their dubious user-friendly advantages. Matthew Darly’s caricature lampooning the so-called macaroni habit of wearing large perukes, titled The Optic Curls, or the Obligeing Head Dress (fig. 33), 75 says it all. In the 1770s, Mary and Matthew Darly published six sets, each of twenty-four caricatures, depicting a group of male contemporaries gazing games ¦ 81

referred to as “macaronis,” the moniker derived from the pasta dish that young men brought back to England from their Grand Tours. Macaronis were self-made fops known for exceedingly extravagant dress and absurdly exaggerated hairstyles, as well as their embrace of decadence, interest in artifice, and pursuit of pleasure. Evidently macaronis were a godsend for caricaturists.76 The popularity of the Darly prints mocking these men ultimately earned the Darly print house the name Macaroni Print Shop. The eccentric costuming of macaronis makes it easy to reconcile a fondness for jewelry and peculiar wigs with extraordinary portrait miniatures. Because of their excessive, uncontrolled, and affectionate manners, macaroni men were regarded as effeminate or even as being of a doubtful gender. A short verse from a contemporary pamphlet sums up this view: The Macaronies are a sex Which do philosophers perplex; Tho’ all the priest of Venus’s rites Agree they are Hermaphrodites77

Pointon has conceived of wigs as expressions of various degrees of masculinity in terms of status and professionalism, and comparisons linking the size of hairdos and the size of genitalia were typical. A macaroni wig, too close to feminine styles, signified deviant sexuality, as this verse demonstrates. Perhaps propelled to outdo these gender-bending styles, women’s wigs had by this time grown to mountainous heights and were frequently adorned with items ranging from three-foot-long feathers to stuffed birds, depending on the occasion. In the Darly print the occasion is a night at the opera, and appropriate elements such as monoculars have been incorporated into the peruke by the swirling curls that surround them. Both the lady and the neighbor on her left hold large eyeglasses to their eyes. It is unclear whether her brownskinned companions, lacking their own quizzing glasses, are thus “obliged” to use those conveniently stuck in her hair. Obviously, though both are in charge of their viewing positions, the female figure in Darly’s print appears more apt to be ridiculed than her ogling male counterpart in Rowlandson’s drawing, a man who is so shamelessly content with himself that other people’s opinions likely do not matter to him at all. If we look at Earlom’s print, the man in the center may be making a bit of a fool of himself by ogling a woman so close to him, but clearly it is the woman whose position is more uncomfortable; she feels it necessary to use her fan to protect herself from an otherwise “hitting” gaze 82 ¦ chapter  2

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

(though, as we have seen, she may have countered this man’s gaze with one of her own). Darly has decided to approach the obvious comical moment from the other side. He ridicules ogling “à la mode” as something that affects not so much the object of sight—usually a woman—as its subject. Ultimately, in all three prints, the butt of the joke is a woman. It is telling that Darly shifts focus and concentrates on the subject of vision rather than its object, but does so without changing the gender specificity of the object of ridicule. The female figure continues to remain the vulnerable party here; however, Darly’s print also reflects gradations of acceptance of certain modes of viewing. The power of enlarged vision (albeit contained in a peruke) and self-protection as exercised by the female figure in Earlom’s print (fig. 17 above) had not been available to women throughout the century. As writing on gazing games published, for instance, in The Spectator demonstrates, in the early eighteenth century the upper-class English had upheld quite a different etiquette regarding staring. The Spectator, published thrice weekly between 1711 and 1714, was produced by writers Joseph Addison and Richard Steele as a way, they stated, of bringing learning out of colleges and schools to dwell in clubs and at tea tables. In the issue of March 23, 1711, the problem of “an Offence committed by the Eyes” is addressed at length. In a letter submitted to the periodical, a woman complains about an ocular “Trespass” upon women at church: “I have remarked a kind of Men, whom I choose to call Starers [who] disturb a large Company with their impertinent Eyes.”78 The impertinence of his stare, the letter writer continues, is so disturbing that instead of concentrating on sermons and prayers, the female congregants suffer from vexation, confusion, and blushing. The Spectator offers a sympathetic response. He admits there is no remedy to this new plague, especially not for a woman who would compromise her reputation when confronting the Starer by returning his gaze: “[Our Women] have no Defense, but in the End to cast yielding Glances at the Starers.” If the barbarian does not change his behavior, the Spectator warns, he will send down one of his friends, who, “according to the most exact Rules of Opticks, [will] place himself in such a manner that he shall meet his Eyes wherever he throws them.” Apparently the Starer can be stopped only if he is stared down by another man and made into a public spectacle so that he can “feel a little of Pain he has so often put others to, of being out of Countenance” (1:86). The Spectator, disapproving of this kind of impertinent staring, is an expert in studying the world around him: “I have, methinks, a more than ordinary Penetration in Seeing; and flatter my self that I have looked . . . at 84 ¦ chapter  2

the inmost Thoughts and Reflections of all whom I behold” (1:19–20). As such, the Spectator is duly aware that a return of the look poses a threat to his own scopic power as well. Though proposing modesty in place of impudence (“without which Beauty is ungraceful, and Wit Detestable”), he knows all too well that his position as autonomous subject is undermined under the gaze of the other. Indeed, the Spectator admits that for him “the greatest Pain [he] can suffer, [is] . . . being talked to, and being stared at” (1:6). Attempting to avoid altogether this danger of subordination, he intends to remove himself from the world’s look by an inconspicuous look of his own, as well as dressing down and keeping his complexion a “very great Secret” (1:6). In other words, the Spectator’s greatest desire is to become invisible so as to maintain at all costs his position as subject of vision and to guarantee his control over his more-than-ordinary capacity for observation. Evidently either one sees or one is being seen. The clear division between these two positions or modalities in the visual field is further emphasized if we look at Eliza Haywood’s writings. Consciously following Addison and Steele’s Spectator, Haywood adopted the position of observer/writer in an attempt to gain authority of vision when she started The Female Spectator, a periodical with a reformist agenda to which she was the sole contributor, which ran from 1744 to 1746. The Female Spectator was the first magazine specifically issued for women by a woman. As Juliette Merritt has pointed out, Haywood was deeply concerned in her writings with the voyeuristic aspect of spectatorship and the growing ambiguity of the position of the spectator.79 Her interrogation of spectatorship and spying reached its pinnacle in her novel The Invisible Spy, published in 1755, in which a magician bestows upon a spy a Belt of Invisibility that, once wrapped around a body, renders it invisible. The pleasures of prying into other people’s affairs is enjoyed by the female protagonist of The Invisible Spy on the condition that she wear the magical belt, enabling her to become a truly all-seeing narrator, living out the desire of being removed from the world’s look that the Spectator toyed with. For both sexes the ultimate fantasy of spectatorship involves the loss of the body. A very popular literary outgrowth of the late eighteenth century seems to give further evidence of the apparently widespread cultural fantasy of an invisible, all-seeing narrator. In so-called object narratives such as The Adventures of a Pincushion and The Adventures of a Bank-Note (Thomas Bridges, 1770) and The Adventures of a Rupee (Helenus Scott, 1782), the point of view is that of a constantly circulating thing that, with its sightless vision, offers a perspective onto the world from the insides of objects. The reader follows, for instance, the story of a bank note that finds its way gazing games ¦ 85

from a woman’s snuffbox to a silk mercer’s drawer, and so on, sketching portraits of the human figures from a faceless point of view and continuing to circulate without ever finding its proper place.80 Going beyond the possibility of omnivoyance, such object narratives push experiments with a bodiless point of view even further by detaching perspective from its traditionally fixed position so that it can plunge deeply into private spaces. Extending beyond peeping illegitimately into letters, a desire that the epistolary novel appeals to, in Adventures of a Bank-Note we, as readers, descend with the bank notes into pockets, drawers, and snuffboxes to see how the world looks from these intimate places. To be a pure, bodiless eye is what the Spectator—as much as Haywood’s spy or, for that matter, the reader of epistolary novels or object narratives—eventually wishes to be. In this way the Spectator stands in sharp contrast to the hermaphroditic macaroni, who draws as much attention to his figure and person as he can and doubtless would enjoy the impudent ocular behavior typified by the Starer. Although the Spectator makes no mention of optical devices, a spyglass would not fit in the hands of the Starer he describes. As Mercier wrote, “Excellent eyes pretend to be imperfect in order to use a useless instrument which is more often than not an affectation.”81 Therefore, the spyglass belongs rightfully in the hands of a macaroni, who would be only too proud to show it as a sign of visual extremity and affectation. At the same time, the macaroni does not need a bewitched form of protection to gratify his desire to watch. The gender-bending of the macaronis, parading around with their high perukes, conspicuous tailcoats (some of them with painted buttons, no doubt), and useless spyglasses, in fact regulated voyeurism as a socialized way of seeing by soliciting the look. The macaroni men expose themselves willingly, just as the ogled women and the ogling men do, and are not the least concerned with being found out. Indeed the late-eighteenth-century spy is a self-made figure no longer in need of supernatural powers, a person who has brought his fantasy out in the open by stepping into the public sphere holding his eyeglass as a trophy, or even a sovereign’s scepter. Thus voyeurism as a typically male kind of looking becomes regulated, even expected, when fused with curiosity, an essentially female mode of looking, and is “tamed.” Eye miniatures emerge on a scene in which the regulation, taming, and exploration of various forms of vision were at an advanced stage. Dressing exuberantly, given to eccentric tastes, Richard Cosway has often been referred to as a macaroni artist, known for painting the same class of people that he himself aspired to belong to. It comes as no surprise, then, that Cosway—a peculiar yet trendy figure, a celebrity often discussed by 86 ¦ chapter  2

smirking fellow artists—was credited with launching the vogue for eye portraits. If we consider them for a moment as cultural symptoms, we can say that in this context they may signify the living out of a cultural fantasy of pure vision. Indeed, in the hands of the Prince of Wales, allegedly a bit of a macaroni himself, the eye miniature of Mrs. Fitzherbert, which was after all Cosway’s creation, served as an accessory for making a spectacle of himself. If eye portraits, along with spyglasses, are at all symptomatic of a certain development in an eighteenth-century culture preoccupied with watching, they signify how the notions of curious looking and voyeurism tended to merge. An unstable middle way had been established between ogling and being ogled, between a self-conscious play in which the object of vision invites the subject’s look, with the shameless (one could say jubilant) subject of looking not even pretending to have impaired vision, and the mere performance of the look. The eye miniature thus enters the miseen-scène of gazing games when these various players have taken their positions. What eye portraits further reveal is that this merging of voyeurism and viewing involves the (partial) reversal of the subject-object position, or, to formulate this more precisely, it conceives of it as somehow fluid. Related concepts such as the action “to peep” and the state of being “curious” confirm a sliding between objective and subjective applications. As Benedict points out, “to peep” was initially defined in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary as “first appearance” and was subsequently described as “curious looking.” The word “burgeon,” for instance, designating a looking-glass, an eye, or a one-eyed person, became a term to describe “an inquisitive person.”82 To resemble an eye portrait may have been the ultimate desire of the Spectator and Haywood’s spy—to inhabit the visual field removed from the look of the world, to be reduced to a stare, to become an eye or embody pure vision, a vision that calls forth the fantasy, as Haywood also implies, that it can be exercised without body or face: a faceless point of view. The ocular portrait, however, would ideally have eyes only for its beholder. It was created to “see” that particular sight, not the spectacle of the world. The subversion that eye portraits offer involves the slippage, if not the fusion, of subject and object positions, as both agents and representation of monocular vision. What eye portraits ultimately reveal is that, in fact, monocular vision transgresses the separation between the subject and object of vision, the two sides of the visual field. Only through monocular vision can such slippage take place. We have arrived here at a sight that has turned into a point, a face that has become an eye, and a representation that serves simultaneously as gazing games ¦ 87

agent of vision, a collision that has never before been depicted or shown in portraiture, or in the whole of painting for that matter. We may say that although female eyes outnumber male ones, or precisely because this is the case, the eye portrait may be credited with possessing, as Roland Barthes called it, both sexes of sight.

Both Sexes of Sight In his short essay “The Eiffel Tower,” Barthes writes that the Eiffel Tower, like man himself being the only one not to know his gaze, is the only blind point of the optical system at whose center it stands. Indeed, the only way not to see the Eiffel Tower in Paris is to sit in its restaurant (as Guy de Maupassant famously exclaimed). An object seen from every spot in the city, it also becomes a point from which one sees Paris extending toward the horizon, a place that as such centralizes sight both ways: as the ultimate point of reference as much as a point of view for the city dweller, who is dominated by the tower while in the city but is also able to exercise visual power over the city from its elevation. For Barthes, the tower reconciles the active instrument of seeing such as an eye or a camera, which does not contribute anything to the visual field, and the passive spectacle of the spread-out city that is fundamentally blind to itself. “The Tower (and this is one of its mythic powers) transgresses this separation, this habitual divorce of seeing and being seen,” Barthes concludes. “[I]t archives a sovereign circulation between the two functions; it is a complete object which has, if one may say so, both sexes of sight.”83 Eye portraits are in their way reminiscent of how Barthes describes the tower: a reconciliation of the passive and active sides of the visual. The eye picture is a representation as well as an instrument of vision that looks back at us. Rather than only an “objective” thing in the traditional, early-modern sense of the term as an object of thought and perception, it is also a depiction of someone looking at us from a certain point where we, as viewers, are not. It allows us to see even as, all the while, its sole point seems to be seeing us—indeed, as if it were a complete object that possessed both sexes of sight. In the context of the history of figurative painting, this completeness comes at a certain cost. For what the eye picture shows is a portrait reduced to its essentials, a “naked” portrait stripped bare until we are left with its uncanny ogle staring at us from within the realm of the pictorial, offering us nothing but a gaze resting upon us.

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3 the crying image The Withdrawal of the Gaze

How wisely Nature did decree, With the same Eyes to weep and see! —andrew marvell

Weeping and Seeing Topped by a narrow, elegant eyebrow, a dark blue eye looks straight out at us from within its octagonal golden frame (plate 12). The eye is placed just left of center, and the composition leaves a void on the right side where part of the nose-bone should have been. This eye, like most others, calmly watches the viewer. However, a close examination reveals that something else is going on. This eye is silently weeping: two small crystals attached to the ivory surface representing teardrops are falling down from its corner. The teardrops add an expressive, or rather, an emotional dimension to the otherwise immobile stare, which makes this small ocular portrait moving 89

if not touching. Such an effect makes it unlikely that this particular eye would have participated in the high-society gazing games discussed in the previous chapter, for example as the frivolous exposure of an illicit affair. On the contrary, the tears do not appear light and playful at all, and if they convey a message it must be a solemn revelation. The crystal drops appear to “frame” the otherwise hard stare of the eye, softening it to a certain extent, an effect of alleviation that gets multiplied in eye portraits framed by pearls. Traditionally (Christian) symbols of tears, pearls, set in a frame as for instance surrounding the eye portrait in plate 13, further emphasize the sorrow expressed in its shedding of diamond tears (ca. 1790). In both cases, the hard stare in combination with the shed tears implies a connection between seeing and weeping. Apparently the eye is crying because of what it sees, and yet what it sees is, supposedly, its exclusive recipient. Partly worn off, an inscription on the reverse side of the eye in plate 12 reads: “Tho.s [-]rvis Purvi[-] Ob.t Mar.c 1792 Aet 24,” revealing that this eye commemorates the death of a man named Thomas Purvis, who died in March 1792 at the age of twenty-four. Similar engravings on the reverse side of eye portraits suggest that as many as one out of five eyes once served as mourning jewelry. In light of their status as portraits, the question arises whether the two crying eye pictures have been created “after death” rather than “after life,” and as a consequence should be considered depictions of a dead person’s gaze. Thomas Purvis’s eye could have been painted after his death, possibly modeled after other (miniature) portraits, or alternately the inscription may have been added posthumously to its reverse side.1 Whether or not created after his death, Purvis’s eye further distinguishes the eye portrait from the portrait miniature. For instance, it is unlikely that it would have served as an object prompting the bereaved to mourn their loss, as we see in the portrait by Richard Cosway of Margaret Cocks mourning her beloved sister Mary Russell (1787, plate 14). In this intimate scene, Margaret takes on a contemplative posture, her head resting on her hand, while her thoughts go to the memory of Mary, whose miniature portrait (by Cosway’s great rival John Smart) rests in her lap. Margaret’s elbow leans on the letter that lies on the table, presumably including her sister’s last words. Cosway has brilliantly managed to picture her in minimized, tranquil distress, creating thereby a rather attractive image of sorrow. Not shedding dramatic tears, Margaret’s eyes are only slightly moist, as if she has been beholding the picture through a haze of sadness. Compared to Margaret’s portrait miniature in Cosway’s painting, Purvis’s eye must have played a slightly different role in its owner’s pro90 ¦ chapter  3

cess of mourning. Even if we imagine it placed in the lap of a survivor, its effect must have been distinct, for one because it is not a likeness of a lost face that can be cried over, but it is crying itself. The tears appeal to the beholder, and rather than evoking remembrance and deep feelings of sorrow as expressed by Margaret, Purvis’s weeping eye insists on quite a different kind of response and attention. In previous chapters we have seen how eye portraits established a kind of channel facilitating a clash between painted and actual gazes in a transmutation of imagined and real spaces. Calling upon the beholder by looking at him or her rather than simply being seen, the staring eye transforms the perceptual field in a circuit of intimate vision. Such a call for intimacy seems to be reinforced by the tears leaving Purvis’s eye. Rather than just returning the beholder’s gaze, this eye weeps tears that are performative, attached to the ivory not merely to represent weeping but also to trigger a particular response. Purvis himself may have been silenced forever, yet his eye is still crying and his gaze is still “speaking” inasmuch as it makes some kind of demand. The crystal drops appear as an invitation, albeit a profoundly contradictory one, as Purvis’s eye is shedding tears over its own death. Does it ask its beholder not so much to remember as to cry? Does Purvis’s eye not so much evoke the remembrance of his living gaze as insist upon expressing grief on its own behalf? The consolation given by this crying eye portrait is thus a dubious one. This chapter will examine the particular kind of address of crying eye portraits by considering their rhetoric of tears in the context of the cult of sentimentality that provides their breeding ground, and the resulting booming industry in sentimental and mourning jewels that developed during that period. The notion of a “speaking gaze” that is “voicing” a kind of demand will be further explained via comparisons of eye pictures to mourning jewels that include mottos like epitaphs on gravestones. I will argue that rhetorical figures like apostrophe and prosopopoeia in epitaphs as performative speech acts voiced by the dead to their survivors have a similar structure of address as the tears in the eye portraits. The comparison of eye portraits to mourning jewels like hair devices will raise the question of how the painted gaze actually relates to the dead body. To what extent should we redefine the address of the crying eye in terms of overcoming death in the case of a deceased sitter? Purvis’s eye portrait questions the status of the gaze as it is portrayed as somehow detached from its originating body. Is this supposed to be a gaze that lives on after the body has passed away, a gaze that outlives its container, or its the crying image ¦ 91

support, in order to still rest on its survivors? Are we dealing here with a “dead” gaze? These questions will be answered by linking the presumably dead gaze of eye miniatures to the stare of two other marginal instances of portraiture involving departure, namely death masks and wax portraits. A discussion of Julius von Schlosser’s work on wax busts and Jean-Luc Nancy and Martin Heidegger’s reflections on the withdrawal of the gaze in death masks will further illuminate the difference between the appeal of dead, alive, and living gazes. As we will see, wax heads, death masks, and crying eye portraits partly resist art-historical analysis through their ability to look back from beyond the grave, staring with a gaze that is already “withdrawn.” If we consider them theoretical objects in Mieke Bal’s sense of the term, we allow ourselves to go along with this withdrawal and the “demand” that it entails, and see how the object’s initial resistance to analysis may ultimately lead us to new insights. One of these insights, I argue, will be that eye portraits do not look “at” but “for” us, and that this mode of vision exacts a loss for which the rhetoric of loss cannot properly account.2 Even after the contextualization and examination of the eye portrait’s looking for, something will be left over, a kind of openness or expectation. First, a comparison to reliclike hair devices that incorporate genuine remnants of an individual’s corpse will assist in precisely articulating the relation between the dead gaze and the body.

Hair Devices In the last decades of the eighteenth century, at the height of the cult of sentimentality, mourning jewels expressing monumental feelings of loss and grief became highly fashionable, and they continued to be in vogue well into the first part of the nineteenth century. Sentimental jewelry in general, and mourning jewels in particular, came in a great variety of forms and were offered in different kinds of materials and makes. Most common were miniatures, mounted as pendants, rings, or brooches, of figures in sepia seated near tombs adorned with the initials of the deceased. Such sepia images can also be found on lockets and the reverse side of portraits. Often neatly braided hair was incorporated into the picture’s frame, or they otherwise contained locks of hair that were combed to resemble a willow tree or so-called Prince of Wales feathers.3 Cheap and widely known versions were tiny brooches made of woven tresses, sometimes as small as a square centimeter, mounted in simple frames. More expensive ways of working 92 ¦ chapter  3

figure 34.  Hair jewelry, ca. 1840. Hair and gold. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

the hair of a deceased loved one into a jewel involved having it skillfully woven and braided into very fine bracelets, sophisticated necklaces consisting of chains of weaved spheres, or other embellishments (fig. 34). Although such adornments were presumably made exclusively with hair of the deceased loved ones, pattern sheets of artists who advertised themselves as “Miniaturists and Hair Workers” demonstrate that devices made of anonymous hair could be commissioned as well. Especially among women friends it was the habit to literally offer a part of oneself, a gift made out of tresses of hair, such as bracelets or other kinds of jewelry. In her memoirs, Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun writes that she once received from Princess Dolgoruki, whose portrait she had painted, “a bracelet made of a tress of her hair with a diamond inscription reading ‘Adorn her who adorns her century.’ ”4 In fact, the princess had made an almost allegorical gesture of reciprocating Vigée-Lebrun’s gift—in the double meaning of the painter’s talent and her portrait—by adorning her with her own the crying image ¦ 93

hair. Unique presents containing hair were sometimes treasured like relics and passed on within a family to younger members. In 1784, Sir William Hamilton gave his niece Mary a bracelet containing a lock of his hair which his late wife had worn from the moment of their wedding in 1758 until her death in 1782.5 A monarch’s gift of jewelry containing a few royal hairs was considered more valuable than any precious stone. Disappointed that Empress Maria Theresa had not, as she had promised, given her a bracelet clasp set with a double row of diamonds containing a lock of hair, Lady Mary Coke wrote in 1772: “I had some reason to flatter myself that I should have had that favour which would have been more to me than all the diamonds in the world.”6 Mrs. Delany, a court favorite admired for her artistic talent and “social refinement,” reckoned that such a royal gift was worth even more than diamonds. She was delighted when she received from Queen Charlotte, set in a pearl locket with the queen’s crowned ciphers, “a lock of her beautiful hair, so precious a gift is indeed inestimable.”7 Within the economy of gift giving, hair devices would circulate alongside regular likenesses such as the miniature portrait or the highly popular (and affordable) silhouette. Joseph Wright of Derby’s painting The Corinthian Maid, created between 1782 and 1784, epitomizes the legacy of loss embodied by these small artifacts as expressed by the tracing of a cast shadow in the legendary first instance of portraiture. The story of the daughter of a Corinthian potter who traces her lover’s profile on the wall while he is asleep has traditionally served as a foundational narrative of image-making. As Derby’s painting emphasizes, essential to this narrative is the sense of loss that the silhouette signifies and the grief that the moment of its production anticipates. Treasuring a lock of hair was yet another way of holding on to the body of the departed. Whereas the seventeenth-century habit was to simply place such a lock under glass to mount it on a ring, by the late eighteenth century, hair work had begun to aspire to the status of image. In addition to working locks of hair into decorative Prince of Wales feathers, some artists went so far as to turn hair into pigment by chopping it into fine pieces and mixing it with paint or glue, a process whereby the hair relic literally becomes image (fig. 35).8 Such macabre images “painted” with hair blur distinctions among categories of jewelry, folklore, and painting, between relic and likeness, and, as a consequence, between the body and its representation. It was in this hybrid zone where sentimentality ruled, and where making part of the body present as “a present” was socially accepted and even encouraged, that the crying eye picture emerged as yet another sentimental gift, with the gaze as much as the bodily fluid itself 94 ¦ chapter  3

figure 35.  Hair device medallion, ca. 1785. Watercolor on ivory with hair. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

understood as part of the present. These gift ideas were largely in accord with the symbolism, or rather rhetoric, of tears during the age of sentimentality, when tears were presented as a most natural gift that only the body could give.

The Rhetoric of Tears Toward the end of the eighteenth century, it was generally assumed that language failed when met with strong emotion, as it simply did not have the means to capture those intense feelings that only the body could express in a “natural” way. Crying was generally conceived of in a pre-Romantic sense as being superior to words, a fact manifested in the sentimental novels of the period. In literature, paroxysms of emotion were usually conveyed through hyperbole. Cheeks of both male and female protagonists were often awash with tears in response to even the smallest of incidents.9 In line with the era’s emphasis on “natural” expressiveness, their crying faces would be described as landscapes where tears flowed as streams, fell down as rain, or formed torrents. Indeed, it was generally believed that crying brought the body closer to a purely natural state. Before the crying image ¦ 95

the turn of the century, to shed tears as a natural and unaffected expression of inner feeling was completely socially acceptable. Weeping was an expression of compassion and sympathy for men and women alike, before it became, in the light of a new sensibility formed in the first decade of the nineteenth century, a sign of female overreaction. To give one example out of many: in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), characters gathered at a party show not the least surprise when they see Pamela’s father crying at the compliments his daughter receives. “An honest heart springs thus to the eyes,” everyone agrees.10 By the early nineteenth century, however, the meaning and status of crying had significantly changed, a change that Madame de Staël anatomized in Corinne (1807). Weeping is examined throughout the novel as a struggle to avoid exaggeration and excess of emotion while achieving the proper expression of feeling. Two female protagonists, Corinne and Lucile, occupy respectively the opposed attitudes of extraverted dramatic crying and discreet self-control in holding back tears; Lord Nevil, with whom they are both in love, embodies the new masculine attitude by weeping only involuntarily, for instance at the memory of his father’s death. The contrasts of weeping among the three protagonists reveal how this new sensibility partly originated in the search for a new poise, choosing proportion over disproportion, sincerity instead of insincerity of emotional expression, and carved out a deeper gap between masculine and feminine forms of crying.11 Created before this divide between masculine and feminine attitudes toward crying was in place, Thomas Purvis’s tears do not intend to show involuntary release of repressed feelings but on the contrary offer genuine gifts. The meaning of tears as gifts will become clearer if we look at what is arguably the weepiest novel that the English age of sentimentality produced: Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling, published anonymously in 1771. The British forerunner of Werther, it may exceed Goethe’s masterpiece in the quantity of tears that the characters collectively shed. In an 1886 edition of the book, an “index of tears” was included as an appendix, listing the various ways in which weeping is represented—drops glistering, tears “standing” or “meeting” in eyes, tears choked, given, or flowing down, heartbreaking sobbing and gushing. Evidently to a Victorian audience, this index was meant to trigger entirely different sentiments from those expressed by the tears the man of feeling shed. Clearly, as Madame de Staël’s Corinne so meticulously analyzes, the attitude toward expressing emotions by weeping was to change a few decades after Mackenzie published anonymously the bundle of papers his narrator allegedly found. 96 ¦ chapter  3

The main character, Harley, as a man of feeling, is easily moved by joy or sorrow, empathy or horror. Harley sees tears as the essence of goodness that he offers as if the drops were coins. For instance, at one point he listens to a story about an unfortunate girl whose beloved has died from a fever in the West Indies, where he had sought his fortune in hopes of marrying her. Mad with grief, she subsequently refused a husband her wealthy father had chosen for her, after which her father lost his fortune and then died, so that she was left a beggar. Touched by the woman’s misfortunes, Harley gives her story “the tribute of some tears.”12 Eventually, as a response to his watery contribution, the pitiful girl offers him her dead lover’s ring, upon which he bursts out in further tears.13 He considers his tears gifts, akin to real pearls, offered to his interlocutors by way of response. Other sentimental novels of the time testify to a similar understanding of tears. In addition to being presented as a gift, they could be “owed.” One could “cost” someone tears or, by making another weep, could even contract a “debt” of tears.14 We may say that tears served as a currency in the emotional economy of exchange of bodily secretions. In numerous novels, climaxes in the narrative are reached at moments when tears of different characters mix to mark their shared feelings. Indeed, Harley often mingles tears with other characters, sometimes even with total strangers with whom he sympathizes, so as to form an intimate bond of weeping together. A relationship was established when a response was expected. To answer this appeal was considered a true touching of hearts that shared a common emotion. The expectation that interlocutors would join in weeping was extended to the reader of the sentimental novel. Male as well as female readers were invited to enter an intimate relationship with a character by mirroring his or her behavior, going along with his or her fluctuating emotions, and imitating tears whenever possible.15 Denis Diderot, himself particularly prone to crying and vulnerable to fictional tears, considered it virtually inhuman for men among his acquaintances men not to cry over novels by Richardson. For him the legitimatization of such excessive shedding of tears was provided by Rousseau’s Confessions (1782) and Julie, or the New Heloise (1761), preeminent examples of the age of sensibility. Such an extreme bodily response could also result from standing in front of paintings. In his Salons, Diderot wrote without any reservations about the feelings he experienced when viewing, for instance, Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s Girl Crying over Her Dead Bird (1759). Greuze’s thinly veiled allegory on the loss of virginity aroused strong feelings when it was first exhibited in 1765. Diderot responded with the same ardor as the rest of the crying image ¦ 97

the audience to its sentimental depiction of a young girl, her eyes downcast, regarding a bird cage on which lies a white canary, belly-up, its head hanging over the edge. What is interesting about Diderot’s response is not whether his outburst is sincere but that, like Harley’s, it seems almost an automatic reaction. Such tears can be considered affects in the more traditional (non-Deleuzian) sense of the term, evoking contagious and involuntary responses like yawning, smiling, or blushing. In the age of sensibility, tears as affects in fact doubled as emotion was transferred to others, thereby increasing their intensity.16 Indeed, Harley’s crying appears to be even more passionate than the weeping of others to which he almost involuntarily responds. In the context of the theater, Voltaire once remarked that he required that actresses recruited for his plays possess the talent to elicit tears from the audience. Parallel to a touching painting or novel, the actress herself would weep first in order to let her spectators cry, offering, so to speak, her tears to her audience with the expectation that they would return the gesture with even greater enthusiasm. This skill was called the “gift of tears,” a theatrical term that according to Émile Littré’s nineteenth-century Dictionary means “to weep in such a way as to cause others to weep.”17 In light of tears as affect we may be able to better understand the meaning and function of crystals or diamonds attached to eye portraits. They could be considered a tribute, in Harley’s terms, as drops offered to the beholder with the expectation that she or he would join the eye in weeping, entering a particular kind of intimacy once the tears of the picture and the beholder mingle. Indeed, as we have seen with the man of feeling, the bond created between two people by crying together is ultimately the aim of a tribute of tears. When we look at the pearl-framed eye in plate 13, the diamond tears that here “glister” just off the eye can be seen as a gift of sentimental as well as monetary value. Crying eye portraits should thus be understood as deeply rooted in the late-eighteenth-century rhetoric of tears, their breeding ground being the cult of sentimentality. However, this context, though invaluable for interpreting these trinkets, does not account for the paradox that we have observed in tears shed by a dead person’s eye. Death adds a dimension to these tears: they are not just given as tribute prompting a response. If tears are mighty orators, as many poets have suggested, what do the drops rolling down Purvis’s eye tell us?18 What do they wish to say? The “intention” of weeping eye portraits becomes clearer when we compare them to mourning jewels including mottos that read like demands voiced by the dead.

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Apostrophe and Prosopopoeia, or Voices from the Dead If the plastic arts were put under psychoanalysis, the practice of embalming the dead might turn out to be a fundamental factor in their creation. —andré bazin In the second half of the eighteenth century, mourning lockets combining a lock of hair with a tiny image of figures lamenting the death of a loved one became increasingly popular. One among many examples is a locket with a black-enameled gold frame in which is mounted a miniature (ca. 1790, fig. 36). The tiny composition shows a woman seated by a neoclassical urn, bearing the initials “IG,” that rests on a pedestal, whose plinth is inscribed with the words “not lost but gone before.” Such epitaphs testify to the idea that mourner and mourned will remain in contact, bound by an eternal love that reaches beyond the grave. This connection has been translated in visual terms by compositions showing tombstones partly broken down and revealing an opening through which contact with the lost person might be made, as we see in figure 37 (1789). One ring depicts a female figure dressed in a neoclassical tunic who rests her arm on a tombstone that reads: “sacred i will keep thy dear remains” (1786, fig. 38).19

figure 36.  Memorial medallion, “Not Lost but Gone Before,” ca. 1790. Ivory. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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figure 37.  Anonymous, Memorial for S. C. Washington, 1789. Watercolor on ivory, with seed pearls, ivory pieces, and gold wire. Yale Art Gallery, New Haven, Promised Deutsch Bequest. figure 38.  Memorial Ring in Memory of Cath Motley, ca. 1786. Watercolor on ivory set in gold. Barbara Robbins Collection.

The apparent owner of the ring speaks to the dead loved one, promising that his or her remains will be cared for. In rhetorical terms such speech is known as an apostrophe, a (poetic) invocation addressed to an inanimate object (or, as in this case, a dead person). One of the best-known examples of apostrophe is Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Ode to the West Wind” (1820), in which the poet invokes the wind as a creature or spirit: “O Wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being.” The use of apostrophe and animation in Shelley’s poem may further illuminate the intricate relation between deceased and survivor we see in crying eye portraits in particular. In the poem, not only is the west wind invoked by the lyrical I, but the wind becomes a figure for the power to animate through its life-giving breath. Similarly, in the dedication “sacred i will keep thy dear remains,” the address of the “I” turns the deceased into a “you,” though the content of the invocation concerns the remains of the “you.” Apostrophe in this case takes a fundamental step of constituting the “you” as the subject it once was, all the while speaking of treasuring its corpse. The invocation typical of mourning pieces is also apparent in purely visual terms in a miniature created in 1787 by Richard Cosway. We see again Margaret Cocks lamenting the death of her sister Mary, this time by tenderly embracing an urn supposedly containing her remains (fig. 39).20 The fourteen-year-old girl pillows her cheek lovingly against the curvature of the urn, the shadow cast by the index finger of her right hand suggesting that she is caressing its surface. Her upraised eyes are directed toward her sister’s initials and year of death, letters and ciphers signifying her absence. The way Margaret addresses the urn—her sorrow beautifully restrained—makes an actual inscription redundant, yet it is not difficult to imagine her whispering the same apostrophic phrase as is found on the sepia miniature. The characteristic ambiguity of Margaret’s sentimental dedication, with the mourner controlling her grief so as to almost delight in it, is also evident in J. G. Lavater’s widely distributed Essays on Physiognomy (1786), some editions of which include an illustration of five different expressions of emotion such as desire, sorrow, and affliction by a female personification (fig. 40).21 The feeling of abandonment, for instance, is depicted by a young woman holding a letter in her lap while sitting near a table or elevation on which an urn is placed, much like Cosway’s oil painting of Margaret (plate 14 above). Another vignette depicts a veiled woman embracing an urn while resting her head against it, as if overcome with grief. the crying image ¦ 101

figure 39.  Richard Cosway, Margaret Cocks, 1787. Watercolor on ivory. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

According to Lavater, this picture demonstrates the proper expression of grief, in contrast to the uncontrolled sorrow represented by a figure with unkempt hair who stretches out her arms in despair. Wittingly or unwittingly, Cosway seems to have agreed here with Lavater, as his miniature, rather than lamenting Margaret’s bereavement, is revering her sister’s death. The young girl is portrayed as if she delights in her devotion to the urn, acting out the typically paradoxical sentiments of “joy of grief ” or “fulfilled absence.”22

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figure 40.  J. G. Lavater, illustration from Essay sure la Physiognomie (The Hague, 1786).

In the sepia miniatures and Cosway’s picture, apostrophe serves to overcome the temporal problem involved when something once present has been lost. Jonathan Culler explains in his seminal essay on the topic that such a loss can be narrated but its temporal sequence is irreversible. Apostrophe, however, is able to displace this irreversible structure, Culler explains, “by removing the opposition between presence and absence from empirical time and locating it in a discursive time.”23 The separation between presence and absence is then governed not by time but by poetic the crying image ¦ 103

power. Apostrophe resists narrative because its “now” is never defined as a moment in a temporal sequence but as the “now” of writing and, in our case, painting. After all, it is only in poetry, or for that matter in imagemaking, that the inanimate or dead “you” can occupy the place of an addressee. In that light, Purvis’s tears do not narrate a story about grief but exploit in visual terms the poetic power of the apostrophe. Displacing the order of time to call back a moment of intimacy that Purvis and the bereaved experienced together, the crystal drops are shed in the “now” of the painting. However, in contrast to Shelley’s poem, the invocation of the eye picture is uttered by the wrong party: it is the eye of the deceased that occupies a similar position as the lyrical “I,” a reversal that seriously jeopardizes the calling and called-upon dichotomy of interpellation. What we see is that in crying eye portraits, apostrophe has been combined with prosopopoeia, a phrase spoken by the voice of the dead. Fascinated with tombstones and their poetic potential, William Wordsworth wrote three essays joined as “On Epitaphs” (1810), in which he describes the inscriptions on gravestones as a midway point between “the land of transitory things—of sorrow and of tears”—and immortality.24 He stresses that epitaphs express close connection with the bodily remains of the deceased by giving “the senseless stone a voice” (86). The desire for a close relation with the dead is the main reason, Wordsworth writes, that epitaphs “so often personate the deceased, and represent him as speaking from his own tombstone. The departed Mortal is introduced telling you himself that his pains are gone . . . and he conjures you to weep for him no longer” (95). Through the epitaph’s prosopopoeia, the dead person has not been given just a voice. As we see in figure 37, the voice assumes a mouth, an eye, and an entire face: indeed, the root of prosopopoeia is prosopon, which means mask or face.25 Such epitaphs bearing voices from the dead appear frequently in mourning jewels as well, for instance in a brooch with a black-enameled gold frame surrounding a miniature embellished with carved ivory, gold foil, and hair and showing a woman seated by a broken column beneath a willow tree (fig. 41).26 She is attended by a cherub who points to an inscription: “weep not it falls to rise again.” From beyond the grave, the deceased seem to offer the bereaved a consolation by asking them not to weep in light of the cycle of life, just as Wordsworth envisions. Though the roles of “I” and “you” have been subjected to reversal, there remains a slight ambiguity as to whose voice is actually heard. This ambiguity, partly generated by the presence of the pointing cupid, gives the impression that not the deceased but death itself has found a voice. A similar ambiguity re104 ¦ chapter  3

figure 41.  Memorial medallion, “Weep not it falls to rise again,” ca. 1785. Ivory. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

garding whose voice is speaking is found in paintings that include what is likely to be one of the best-known epitaphs in the history of art, Et in Arcadia ego. For instance, in a double portrait of Mrs. Bouverie and Mrs. Crewe by Joshua Reynolds (1760s), the two intimate friends—celebrated beauties in their time—sentimentalize over the inscription on a gravestone, one of them gesturing toward it. Similarly, in Nicolas Poussin’s famous painting Arcadian Shepherds of 1647, men kneel in front of a tomb while pointing to the letters as if to spell out their message. In both paintings the epitaph seems to be the topic of deep conversation between the figures, who obviously question its meaning. In a classic essay on the use of the epitaph in painting, Erwin Panofsky continues the discussion started by the ladies and the shepherds by claiming that the main reason for the expression’s ambiguous meaning is confusion as to who is doing the talking. The phrase Et in arcadia ego, he argues, the crying image ¦ 105

should not be translated as “I, too, was born, or lived, in Arcady” but as “Even in Arcady there I am.” The latter translation clarifies for Panofsky that it is not a dead shepherd in the tomb or the tomb itself that speaks, but a personified Death, who declares his presence in the unspoiled wilderness of Arcady. Confirming proposopoeia’s etymology (though without mentioning the term), Panofsky gives the personification not only a voice but a face as well when stating that it is not Death in general but a death’s-head in particular that articulates the words.27 If indeed it is Death personified who speaks the words of the epitaph, the symmetrical structure of the trope implies that the addressees, the living, must be struck by Death’s words and as a consequence are reminded of their own death. Death personified speaks to the living of their death, and this chiasmic constellation of the interlocutor’s reversed positions further explains the paradox apparent in Purvis’s eye portrait. Not only are the positions of “I” and “you” inverted, but in contrast to Wordsworth’s epitaphs in which the voices of the dead tell their survivors not to weep, Purvis’s eye seems to command precisely the opposite. Is it really this tiny picture’s intention to make its beholder cry? Do weeping eye portraits thus go against the tradition of epitaphs? A return to Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” may assist here. As Barbara Johnson has explained in her examination of apostrophe, a similar reversal of the I-you dichotomy occurs in the poem: the west wind is called upon by the lyrical I, who is speaking to the west wind of the west wind, as if he wished to say “Hear how you are blowing.” The lyrical I orders the wind to hear him speak, or hear him read aloud his poem, as if the wind were his audience. The result is that in the course of Shelley’s ode the structure of apostrophe is reversed: the lyrical I exclaims, “[B]e thou me,” ultimately hoping that the wind will animate him as poet as much as he has animated the wind, which is evident from his exclamation “Make me thy lyre.” If we translate this into visual terms, we observe a similar pattern in the crying eye portraits: however, in them the “I” is not a living I evoking an inanimate object but rather the other way round. The complexity of the structure of address may become clearer if we compare the eye pictures with another miniature that plays with notions of absence and presence in terms of apostrophe. This is a sepia miniature of a veiled woman with reddish-brown hair who is clad in a neoclassical tunic (fig. 42). She bends over a silhouette portrait in her right hand. Resting on her other hand, her head is partly covered by a slip of her tunic, which gives the impression that the figure is weeping. The reverse side of this gold frame hanger shows a texture of woven brown-red locks in 106 ¦ chapter  3

an oval setting, the same color as the woman’s luscious head of curls. The strong connection between the red-haired figure on the one side and the auburn plaiting on the other suggests that this portrait-object has been presented as a gift in return for the woman’s receipt of the framed silhouette.28 In this “gift-story” of departure rather than death, the veiled woman’s crying over the silhouette articulates a particular message. She explicates that she will (always) be weeping over the absence of this person, but she does so with a clear sense of theatricality. This image wishes to say, “Look how I am missing you,” and the evident hope is that the person whose framed profile we see will similarly be bending over the hanger in the course of their being apart, missing her in effect. The woven hair is meant as a synecdoche for the woman, who intends to give away much more than her likeness, making part of herself literally present in the “now” of the image. In fact, the woman does not so much wish to be remembered via a lock of her hair as be missed. The portrait-object’s mesfigure 42.  Anonymous, medallion with woman crying, recto and verso, ca. 1790. Watercolor on ivory, hair, translucent enamel. Private collection.

sage makes explicit how she will cling to the precious gift of the silhouette—in its simple frame much less valuable than her gift in return—and expresses as much her affection as the effect that the silhouetted figure’s absence will have on her, as if it wants to say: “Please do miss me the way I miss you.” Hoping to be missed as a fulfillment of the act of missing

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creates a lack, however; classic reciprocity bridges the gap via the symmetry of the correspondence. As a consequence, the I-you dichotomy has not been jeopardized. In contrast, weeping eye portraits continue to pose an intricate problem. If tears are mighty orators, “speaking” a sentimental language of their own that is stronger than words, the crystals shed by Purvis’s eye may convey a natural, even bodily message that goes beyond the more generic mottos and images characteristic of other mourning jewels. In light of the rhetoric of tears, the eye portrait’s crystals or diamonds are a literal gift of tears intended to elicit tears in the eyes of their beholder, establishing a correspondence between the bereaved and the dead. Indeed, the teardrops are visual equivalents of apostrophe and as such animate the beholder to cry. It is not a (lyrical) voice that addresses a dead or inanimate being, but the dead sitter who addresses the beholder, speaking in tears of tears, hoping to be cried over. Barbara Johnson writes how in Shelley’s poem the west wind’s capacity for responsiveness is given not to make it speak but to make it listen to the poet, as he exclaims at the end of several stanzas: “Hear, O, hear!”29 In a similar gesture, eye portraits seem to call out “Weep, O, weep!” yet through this invocation what should be remembered is not Purvis when he was alive but grieving itself—indeed, crying as such. The dynamics of evocation go in reverse direction as the weeping eye, through offering tears, in fact animates as well as reanimates the tears of the beholder. Unlike the projection in the self-reflexive miniature of the veiled woman in the “now” of the image, Purvis’s apostrophizing, prosopopoeic eye continues to set his survivors the task of not letting his absence be filled with oblivion, as if it wishes to state that it is never truly possible for a loss to heal through mourning and weeping. The image of grief becomes a grieving image that keeps on— and insists on—crying, thus turning into a source of sadness rather than a remedy for it. If not paradoxical in its intentions, Purvis’s crying eye is at least genuinely ambiguous in blurring distinctions between addresser and addressee, the bereaved and the dead—a blurring caused by the presence of tears, and resulting in an abyss of sorrow that eventually keeps the memory of the dead man alive. We should note that the tears in Purvis’s eye portrait, or for that matter in plate 13, are not painted and for that reason occupy a different mimetic register. Compared to other fictional elements, such as the painted eyelashes or the iris, the drops have materialized, one may even say actualized, within the tiny frame, and in that sense may be seen as genuine monetary tributes, in Henry Mackenzie’s sense of the term. However, in 108 ¦ chapter  3

the context of apostrophe and prosopopoeia, their materialization can be further explained when we look at a popular poem of Charlotte Turner Smith. In her collection of poems titled Elegiac Sonnets, first published in 1786 (its success evident in the many reprints and extended editions that followed in the course of the next two decades), Smith included three poems collectively called “Sonnets Supposed to Be Written by Werther.” The final sonnet opens with the phrase “Make There My Tomb.” Inspired by Werther’s farewell letter to Lotte describing the corner of the graveyard where he wishes to rest, Smith presents Werther as imagining the ideal burial site as a place visited by Lotte after his death. Lotte visiting Werther’s tomb became a core motif in the Werther iconography that had developed in Britain in the final quarter of the eighteenth century. As demonstrated by an engraving by John Raphael Smith (1783, fig. 43), this motif united tropes of friendship with remembrance and death. In the engraving, Lotte is in fact atypically represented, clad in a long cloak rather than the light flowery dress she usually wears in illustrations. A large hat covers her curls, which otherwise fall loosely over her shoulders. She has just stood up from a small bench on the right, where she has been reading the book she holds in her hand, probably a volume by Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, the author Werther and she used as a code word for their mutual understanding. Smith’s compositions were often copied and widely distributed, including for use in hair lockets adorned with mourning scenes as in figure 44. Reflecting the growing fashion for Werther images and this particular iconography, as well as widespread interest in the epitaph’s typical trope, in her poem Smith lets Werther speak as if from the grave, expressing the hope that his muchbeloved Lotte will mourn him: “The tear shall tremble in my Charlotte’s eyes / Dear precious drops! They shall embalm the dead / Yes! Charlotte o’ver the mournful spot shall weep / Where her poor Werter [sic] and his sorrows sleep.”30 Smith’s poem adds a new dimension to the materialized tears in eye miniatures. By adding crystals or diamonds to the ivory support, the anonymous artists seem to have taken up the image of tears as precious drops quite literally here. In contrast to Mackenzie’s novel, in which tears flow as streams or rain, within mourning iconography the tears Werther hopes that Lotte will shed will “embalm” the dead, understood here in the double meaning of infusing the dead body to preserve it from decay and to preserve its memory from oblivion. Whereas we have seen how in other mourning jewels consolation, if offered, concerns the survivors directly, in Smith’s case Werther wishes to the crying image ¦ 109

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

be comforted about his own impending death. Similarly, in shedding tears over his own death, Thomas Purvis’s eye makes a similar gesture, expressing the hope that the tears will embalm him in the twofold meaning of guarding his remains and preserving his memory, as Wordsworth would have it. Much like Smith’s Werther speaking from the grave, the mute eye picture of Thomas Purvis addresses his survivors, “uttering” a demand by excreting tears. In the “now” of the pictorial language ruled by apostrophe and prosopopoeia, where temporality has been displaced by discursivity, Purvis’s speaking gaze will continue to address its beholders, looking “for” rather than “at” them so as to make known his demand for embalming. The gaze, by way of tears, is presented as excess in the strict sense of the

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figure 44.  Anonymous, medallion with mourning scene, ca. 1800. Watercolor on ivory, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

word—it does not just exist outside the body, but as it continues to address its viewer, it has overlived it.31 Since we have seen how the likeness of the miniature portrait is metaphorically linked with its referent, serving largely as a substitute for the absent body, and the hair device is metonymically related to a part of the body that remains, yet not as hair but as skillfully crafted art object, the question arises how exactly this “alive” gaze in eye portraits relates to the (dead) body.32 Is the depiction of Purvis’s eye a painting of a dead or a living gaze? How are we to imagine a dead gaze that is still weeping? How should we define the notion of painting, indeed of an image as such, when it confronts us with a dead gaze? We may be able to answer these questions when we look at other depictions of “dead gazes” that sometimes appear as very much alive in death masks and as wax portraits. the crying image ¦ 111

The Dead Gaze: Wax Portraits and Death Masks A wax bust of Ferdinand IV (1751–1825), rendered in the last decade of the eighteenth century, presents a startling likeness of the monarch who became king, successively, of Sicily and Naples (ca. 1790, plate 15). Placed on a plinth, the polychrome plaster bust consists of a waxen head adorned with genuine hair in which glass eyes are set. As in the bust of his brotherin-law Leopold II, whose chin stubble was copied by painstaking planting of each hair in the chin and the cheeks (plate 16), the irregularities of Ferdinand’s skin are worked out in meticulous detail. The wax modeler, Joseph Müller, Graf Deym von Stritetz (possibly in collaboration with Leonard Posch),33 made no effort to flatter his sitter; on the contrary, he was merciless in creating a true “lifelikeness” when he reworked this wax cast and carefully molded the king’s double chin, shaped the asymmetrically formed lips, and sculpted the rather undefined line of his nose. The glass eyes are almost sparkling in their astounding clarity and liveliness. The overall effect of this incredibly naturalistic portrait is rather uncanny, unsettling even. Certainly, no oil painting could ever create an image so closely representing its sitter that image and model almost overlap. Whereas a two-dimensional image always presupposes a distance between the representation and its referent, so as to distinguish itself from the world of things, Ferdinand’s bust has annulled this distance. It comes too close, as if it were overexposed, a presence that might easily become too overwhelming. In coming so close, this portrait can be called intimate, but in quite a different way from miniature portraits or eye pictures. Not only does Ferdinand’s unwashed, unkempt, and overall unhealthy appearance put us off; the sculpture’s intimacy seems to be excessive, bordering on an intrusion, a form of touch perhaps. Can a portrait be too intimate for viewers? Julius von Schlosser (1866–1938) in his “History of Portraiture in Wax” (1911) characterizes Ferdinand’s bust as being “almost frighteningly alive: its fidelity to life here verges on indiscretion.”34 His wording is carefully chosen. Indeed, the bust may offend its viewer’s gaze, and this capacity for insult results from transcending the boundary separating an image from what it represents: the demarcation line between the man and his image is not discrete. This bust’s ability to shock is thus caused by a kind of density that abolishes the distance that we, as viewers, expect an image to maintain between itself and the real, between the subject and its support. Jean-Luc Nancy, in his introduction to The Ground of the Image, elaborates on the notion of the discrete in relation to the image and states that “the 112 ¦ chapter  3

thing as image is thus distinct from its being-there.”35 As Schlosser’s use of the term “indiscretion” reveals, we ought to see this distinction between thing as image and as being-there as the safe distance that we, as viewers, wish to keep vis-à-vis a sitter in a portrait. Ferdinand’s bust obliterates such distance. The absence of discretion undermines the subject-object opposition to such an extent that the wax portrait gets into one’s face. Can we call this an instance of intimate vision that borders on the indiscreet, even the obscene? As the viewer’s general response is overall repulsion, we can conclude that the model and the picture physically come too close. Indeed, we do not want to be contaminated by the corporeality of the bust, with its spooky head, filthy hair, and creepy eyes, elements each too haptic to be viewed comfortably. What exactly makes this bust so revolting to look at? When Schlosser’s article was reprinted in German in 1993, editor Thomas Medicus added the phrase Tote Blicke (Dead Gazes) to Schlosser’s original title Geschichte der Portätbildnerei in Wachs, ein Versuch. Medicus may have wanted to make up for the otherwise descriptive and conservative title and to present Schlosser’s history under a more attractive heading. Compelling as the title may sound, his addition does not do justice to the eyes of the wax figures, which appear not dead but very much alive. Nicolas Hilliard’s statement “The eye is the life of the picture,” from his treatise on limning (1600), could not have been more aptly applied as here. The glass eyes, set in the sunken, discolored sockets, are so sparkling that Schlosser’s sense of fright may have resulted from their shine alone. Can the excessive realism of wax appearances be summed up in their glass eyeballs? Does the indiscretion spring from a gaze that is too alive? This contradiction between lively and dead gazes also plays a significant role in the crying eye portraits, one that I would like to further investigate. The gaze of wax portraits may have something to offer here that cannot be found in other forms of portraiture, an excess that spills over and intrudes into our perceptual space, much as eye portraits do, resulting in the loss of our assumed control over it. In an elaboration on wax, Georges Didi-Huberman has defined the nature of the medium as fundamentally excessive.36 For Didi-Huberman, wax always seems to go too far precisely because it appears wholly unmediated, because it consists of organic material. Not only is wax a natural substance, and appears as such, but it also decays in a most “natural” manner. Arguably, to a certain extent an oil portrait degrades as well, yet never to the degree that Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde’s famous novel saw happening, never in a lifetime. Moreover, cracks in a painting’s varnish only the crying image ¦ 113

further emphasize its status as image. When we see the figure through a web of fine hairlines, the distinction between sitter and medium reveals itself on the level of the abrasion that always affects the picture’s surface but never the sitter’s skin. In contrast, beeswax has the capacity to nearly exactly resemble human flesh. It can be handled so that the skin shows individual spots and irregularities such as lines, wrinkles, and blemishes. Vulnerable to a similar process of natural decay, wax discolors much as skin does. Despite being protected by glass cases when on display, busts like Ferdinand’s are easily dirtied, as is evident from his dull and dusty hair, which had presumably been smooth and shiny. Thus, the deterioration of wax busts calls to mind that of the human body, as Schlosser is acutely aware. Comparing Ferdinand’s head to a bust of his granddaughter Maria Louisa, Napoleon’s second consort, he mentions how in 1911 recent restorations had almost completely robbed the figure of the empress of its original character (251). The temporality of the material, the threat that time poses to wax portraits, the smooth fall into oblivion to which they may be subjected, the individual victory over time if they survive against all odds: Schlosser sees these features as central to their history, which is ultimately a history of virtual vanishing, almost disappearance.37 Writing a full century after the heyday of wax busts, Schlosser states in his introduction that his study is not a history proper. He is not interested in the individual merit of an artwork or artist but in wax portraiture as a cultural development that spread among the lower as well as the higher social classes. He argues that wax portraiture was subjected to a democratization of naturalism in the shift from its usage in (sacred) ritual to its functioning as amusement. He makes the case that wax images fit neither a (Vasarian) conception of progress nor a particular genre, but fall outside traditional classifications of historical processes. Such isolation comes with declassification, and in his essay he tries to define an alternative temporality based on the idea that objects may live on (in Riegl’s sense of the term) after ceasing to be used in ritual, ceremony, or daily life, after becoming detached from chronology or taxonomy. Instances of wax portraiture such as French funeral sculpture or Tuscan votive statuary passed out of currency quite painlessly, he explains, and yet wax portraiture did not die out with these forms. Step by step, Schlosser delineates the various developments of wax figures, from a description by Appian of a Roman wax statue of a dead Julius Caesar placed on a rotating device so as to show the public his twenty-three wounds, to effigies of medieval French monarchs partaking in funerary ceremonies, to the role of votives or boti in Renaissance Florence, the display in the chapel in Westminster Abbey 114 ¦ chapter  3

(still in situ) of waxwork of prominent figures, such as Elizabeth I and the Duchess of Richmond accompanied by her favorite parrot, to the way the remnants of wax portraiture, after it ran its full course as a medium, survived in lower social strata, first as the “spoiled child” of the aristocracy (as Ferdinand’s bust indicates) and subsequently as a lower-class horror show of guillotined heads during the Reign of Terror and in the highly popular nineteenth-century houses of wax.38 In order to understand wax portraits in all its aspects, Schlosser thus tries, on the basis of the busts’ resemblance to the human body, to constitute a process that is not historical but psychological. Didi-Huberman has pointed out that like his contemporary and colleague Aby Warburg, Schlosser was influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud, in particular his conception that remembrance and forgetting are integrally linked with materiality. Though I do not wish to underestimate Freud’s obvious impact here, I suggest that the reason for Schlosser’s specific approach may be derived less from psychology or psychoanalysis than from wax portraits’ deep lifelikeness that is rooted in death. The reason wax busts had by the nineteenth century come to be dismissed as a proper mode of portraiture is not that they fall outside any category or genre but that they are too lifelike. Schlosser is only partly aware of the extremity and potential of his observations when he writes in the introduction: “Nowhere has pictorial art ever striven harder to attain the mirror image of reality; nowhere has it taken more literally the metaphor of Narcissus so often applied to it in the academic theses of the Renaissance” (173). What remains unaccounted for in Schlosser’s essay is that wax figures are precisely not mirror images of reality but transgressions of that very image-concept. A mirror image—always—maintains discretion toward its model. The dualism of its reflection will always cause it to be detached from its subject. In wax busts we see how Narcissus’s reflection has been made not literal, as Schlosser seems to think, but physical. The thing as image is not distinct from its being-there, but its being-there collapses with its image.39 The distinction from the thing that an image produces (or that produces the image) has been put on hold: indeed the naturalism of wax busts is an indiscretion, because it transgresses a kind of mimesis, embraced throughout the centuries by low-class visitors of houses of wax and aristocrats owning wax busts of loved ones, but disregarded as art by art history. Wax figures thus confront us with an excess of lifelikeness, a form of sameness the problem of which lies not merely in illusionism but in their “thingness,” their three-dimensionality, or as Schlosser says, their plasticity. the crying image ¦ 115

Explaining that wax portraits are works of art in the technical but not aesthetic sense, he quotes at length Arthur Schopenhauer, who claims that wax figures do not make an aesthetic impression because they are unable to separate form from matter well enough to bring the form alone closer to the Platonic Idea (a process in which painting, for instance, succeeds very well). Making a distinction between form, which can exist an infinite number of times, and matter, such as the individual who exists only once, Schopenhauer argues that wax figures give us both the form and that which can exist only once, yet without the life that gives such existence its fleetingness. “Therefore,” the philosopher concludes, “the wax figure causes us to shudder since its effect is like that of a stiff corpse” (quoted in Schlosser, 299). What Schopenhauer finds so unsettling, apparently, is not the lifelikeness of the figure as such but the death that forms its foundation. Comparable to the mortification of becoming an image by being photographed (and Schlosser mentions how the naturalism of wax portraiture was ultimately served by photography), wax figures are “frighteningly alive” not just because they are nearly identical to their live models but because they are dead. However, this is only part of the story. Schlosser is incapable of realizing the full implications of his essay for the concept of naturalism. Caught up as he is toward the end of this text in an art-theoretical discussion around idealist normative aesthetics and the concept of the beautiful, he gets stuck in the classicist notion of judgment, from which he wishes to free himself. His discussion of a passage by Denis Diderot from his Salon of 1765 on the problem of style in ancient sculpture reveals that the nature of this particular kind of lifelikeness that grows out of death is in fact located in the wax figure’s eyes. In the passage Schlosser quotes, Diderot challenges his reader to consider the contrast between what he calls true (white) and false (colorful) sculpture. The problem for Diderot seems as much the use of color as the replacement, by means of color, of blank eyeballs with gazing eyes. “Hollow out the eye sockets of a stature and fill them with enamel or colored stone eyes, and you will see whether you’ll be able to tolerate the effect,” Diderot writes, making clear that he would turn away in disgust (quoted in Schlosser, 297). “Blind” sculpture with solid plain eyeballs is thus preferable to more realistic eyes, which, according to the philosopher, appear as if they were “gouged out.” Unfortunately, Schlosser does not further comment on Diderot’s emphasis on inset eyes; however, this passage demonstrates that it is the “look” of the figure that Diderot detests, the lively yet dead look that may also have caused Schopenhauer to shudder. We seem to have arrived here 116 ¦ chapter  3

at the opposite of the Pygmalion effect.40 This gives wax portraits, insofar as we see them as portraits, a special status as image. Indeed, what is ultimately unsettling is the combination of the lively effect of the medium of wax with the strength of this figure’s gaze. Diderot could not have agreed more that, as I propose here, the site where a wax figure’s truthfulness is distinguished from falsehood lies in its eyes. Unlike Thomas Medicus’s modification of Schlosser’s title, however, the gaze of wax portraits is not dead. It is not lifelike either, but it appears to be living, having a livingness that is anchored in death, or springs from death, a living-on. Can we possibly conceive of a gaze living on after death? Should we consider the effect of Purvis’s crying eye and others like it in a way comparable to that of the wax busts? If there is such a thing as a “dead” gaze that lives on, what is the nature of this optical or ocular Nachleben? An attempt to answer these questions leads to another instance of marginal portraiture that was popular around 1800: the death mask. The death mask is closely connected to the wax bust, as usually wax portraits were modeled after death masks rather than life casts. Wax busts’ history demonstrate an even closer link with death, as further research has demonstrated that during the Terror in France, Madame Tussaud and her predecessor Philippe Curtius allegedly created wax faces that were cast after guillotined heads; this underscores the use of wax to create an image of the liveliness of death.41 In a further inquiry into the relation between intimacy and indiscretion, I will examine the status of the image regarding waxes, death masks, and eye portraits.

Undying Faces Let’s look at the death mask of Queen Louisa of Prussia to further examine the relation between (marginal) portraiture and the possibility of a dead gaze (1810, fig. 45). The mask shows us the imprint of a tranquil face with smooth, firm skin and a strong, decisive pair of lips. The casting is rendered to look as if the queen’s face has been framed by a scarf. Like other death masks, Louisa’s face is devoid of frowns or twists signifying pain or agony. On the contrary, her face looks serene and dignified, as if of a woman asleep, or at least of a queen who in closing her eyes finds a brief moment of rest. At any time, it seems, she will lift her eyelids to return to a waking state. Her eyes may be closed, but the mask is not completely devoid of a gaze. If we compare Louisa’s death mask to the blind white marble busts that Diderot so admired, it is clear that the effect of the unseeing eyes is the crying image ¦ 117

figure 45.  Anonymous, Death Mask of Queen Louisa of Prussia, 1810. Plaster. Princeton University Library, Princeton, NJ.

not the same. Though both are lacking in detail, the stare into nowhere of the blank, wide-open marble eyes stands in significant contrast to the more intimate “presence” of a look in Louisa’s death mask that seems to hide behind the closed lids. The heavy lids have been protectively folded over the dead sitter’s presumably broken eyes, and yet something goes out from underneath them, or shines through. As in most death masks, the combination of the well-articulated eyeballs and their lowered lids cause the seeing and nonseeing to overlap, suggesting a present-absent gaze. Indeed, we cannot escape the impression that the death mask has a “look,” one that turns to us at the moment at which our gaze is returned. Ought we to consider death masks as having a kind of look that, though not supported by eyes, is nonetheless central to their images? This ques-

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tion can be properly addressed only if we raise the issue of the death mask’s status as portrait and as image. Indexically related to the dead sitter, the mask is the imprint of how the face looks after the subject has passed away. As we have seen, the negative portrait has been traditionally used as the mold for waxen heads. Strictly speaking, the death mask as imprint is not a portrait in the sense of a copy, a resemblance, or a tracing. Rather, it serves as a model and mold of a portrait, and in that sense it precedes the portrait in a temporality that Didi-Huberman has called anachronistic. While pondering the definition of the image, and the question what comes “before” the image, Martin Heidegger has elaborated on the complexities of the look of the death mask. In his commentary on the Kantian schema of imagination, Heidegger defines image in terms of the various aspects it offers. He responds directly to Kant’s problem of how a concept, for instance “dog,” can be applicable to its appearance. After all, no image can ever be adequate to the concept of “dog” as a whole. However, as Kant explains, there seems to be a rule according to which the concept “dog” is delineated into a figure of a four-footed animal in our imagination.42 Therefore, there must be a mediating representation between the concept of “dog” and its appearance, Kant reasons, a schema that is itself pure to the extent that it is devoid of all empirical content. A product of the imagination, the schema is itself not an image but can be understood as a set of conditions by means of which a synthesis between concept and appearance can be established. That is, a schema, which exists only in thought, produces the image of a concept, though not as it is but as it appears. Remaining rather enigmatic about the schemata, Kant describes them as “an art concealed in the depths of the human soul,” the exact workings of which will never “open to our gaze” (183). In his chapter “Image and Schema” in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (first published in 1929), Heidegger pursues to unearth this “art” of image-making apparently buried so deeply in the human mind. He is particularly interested in Kant’s understanding of the schema as a set of rules that produces the image in the sense that it is formed by it, which consequently means that the schema must precede the image, all the while conditioning it. Essential to Heidegger is the schema’s being an image-making set of rules that anticipates not so much the image as its product as the fact that the image “gives itself to be seen.” The Kantian schema may remain invisible in the sense that it will never “open to our gaze,” but, Heidegger claims, it precedes a gaze toward which the image will give itself to be seen. The gaze, then, connects image and schema and subsequently conditions the image’s look. the crying image ¦ 119

For Heidegger, therefore, the first aspect of an image is the look directed toward us: “First of all, image can mean: the look of a determinate being insofar as it is manifest as something at hand. It offers the look.”43 This first aspect of the look of an image is not unique to the original image (if such a thing exists at all) but remains manifest, the philosopher explains, in an image’s copy. A reproduction thus transcribes the image, as well as the “showing itself ” of the image. A photograph of a thing thus shows the thing, it shows itself as photograph, and, moreover, it shows the “showing itself ” of the photographed thing. Heidegger seems to argue here that it is precisely the look of an image that we see in such re-production (or Nachbild, which literally means after-image), as much as in the image as model or example (Vorbild in German, which means beforeimage).44 In order to further illuminate his point, Heidegger takes a most remarkable step by referring to a rather unusual example: a photograph of a death mask. In it we see how the look of the image is offered, he explains, as the photo shows the mask, as well as showing itself as photo; further, it shows that which the mask shows, namely “how the face of a dead man looks outward” (66). Intrigued by Heidegger’s discussion, Jean-Luc Nancy in his essay “Masked Imagination” tries to explain the philosopher’s unlikely deathmask example. Inspired by the popular book Das Ewige Antlitz (Undying Faces), published in 1926 by Ernst Benkard, Heidegger found the death mask so intriguing because he considered it a representation of the production of an image in the Kantian sense. What Heidegger’s example reveals for Nancy is how a dead man looks, and how he, robbed of a gaze himself, shows himself. Aspects of showing and seeing have been folded over in this particular example, as the image combines a look with a nonlook, as is evident in Queen Louisa’s death mask. The active and passive senses of seeing and showing have thus been reconciled in the notion of the image’s “look.” In fact, Nancy asserts, the image of the death mask resembles a seeing; more precisely formulated, it is like a gaze. If we follow Heidegger to the extent that the photo is an example of the image as look, it implies a temporality whereby the gaze comes before the image, as it is the anticipation of a gaze that produces an image as a givento-be-seen. Comparing the death mask of Queen Louisa to an oil portrait of her, for instance the one by Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun of 1801 (plate 17), we see how an oil portrait as a representation of an event (a sitting) in the past continues to take place in the everlasting present tense of painting: a portrait is a past made present. With the photo of a death mask, there is a

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fundamental difference. A past look and a present look have been superimposed: the sitter has seen but does not see now. What came before this image, the sitter’s look, remains apparent in the present though his eyes are empty. This “present past” of the death mask, Nancy writes, ultimately shows us “the withdrawal of the look.” We see what a dead man’s face looks like at the very moment that his gaze withdraws—neither absent nor present, neither past nor present. It is the withdrawal of the gaze that in the end sums up the definition of an image for Heidegger. Thus offering the look, which as we have seen comes both after the image in the death mask’s reproduction, or Nachbild, and before it, as the death mask serves as its model or Vorbild, the image is like a gaze. We can push Heidegger’s and Nancy’s reasoning even further if we recall the death mask’s function as a mold for wax portraits, so that it literally comes before the image. When the wax bust of Queen Louisa was made after her mask, the hollow cavity was filled with wax to form the look of her face. Her portrait would thus come after the imprint-as-model. In the context of Nancy’s and Heidegger’s discussion, we can now better explain what probably filled Schlosser with fright and what made Schopenhauer shudder. When placing glass eyes in the empty sockets left by the mold, the wax modeler is essentially playing with a return of the withdrawing gaze. If we assume with Nancy that the death mask shows a withdrawal of the look, its return via materialized glass objects is ghostly indeed. The look thrown toward us by this “thing” that is more than a thing, that cannot see yet returns our gaze, exposes an excessive deadliness in this dynamic of withdrawal and return, and this tension ultimately undermines its definition as image. The glass eyes simultaneously underscore and outdo the withdrawal of the gaze, making it almost impossible to mark a clear distinction between image and model, portrait and sitter, subject and object. The wax bust is indeed indiscreet in the senses both of giving offense and of being indistinct yet on the level of the look. We seem to have reached a point where we can see how Heidegger’s and Nancy’s sophisticated notions of the image are somehow surpassed by the image’s position vis-à-vis the look. For what Heidegger fails to notice, as Nancy mentions, is that the look of the dead man is in fact a death look. Or, more precisely formulated, it is the death of the look (96). For all its lifelikeness, it is the death of the look that is visible, a detachment of the gaze from the body. It is this detachment that we locate in the crying eye of Thomas Purvis.

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The Gaze as Image If an image of a death mask is like a gaze, can the gaze in eye portraits be said to be like an image? In the context of the discussion of image as look by Heidegger, Kant, and Nancy, we see how in Purvis’s eye and others like it the distinctions between image and gaze even further blur, or rather, break down. Do we see in the glister of the tears a glimpse of a withdrawing gaze? This is an image that comes before the image to the extent that it is a mere look. Does the look come before the image and after death? Purvis’s gaze has departed the body where it originates, however; we may even say in light of my analysis of the death mask, that his gaze, after his death, now comes “before” his perished body, or even “before” a regular portrait if such a picture had survived. Indeed, if we assume with Nancy and Heidegger that the look comes “before” the image (that is, before its formation as image), eye miniatures show us what a point of view would look like when the image has been stripped. Not only the gaze is withdrawing—in terms of portraiture, the likeness as such has departed here as well, leaving us with this tiny, monocular stare, looking out at us, or rather, “for us.” If we assume that this eye portrait shows us a glimpse of a departing gaze, it leaves something behind. Its “look” is “looking for” us. The question is not what this image (or this gaze) wants, in W. J. T. Mitchell’s terms, but what it demands. If Thomas Purvis’s eye portrays a dead gaze, its gaze must have somehow outlived itself, still in command to the extent that it may be “speaking” to the bereaved. Perhaps Purvis’s eye does not come before but after the image, as it depicts a kind of after-image of a living gaze. If not a gaze’s Nachbild in Heidegger’s terms, Purvis’s eye may certainly be called a gaze’s Nachleben or afterlife, as it appears to have survived far more than the mere death of its sitter. It has left something behind that art-historical approaches cannot fully account for, and that remains open and indeterminate. Such a remainder may have methodological consequences related to what Michael Ann Holly and Sarah Kofman have termed the melancholy of art history.45 Holly understands art-historical melancholy as the discipline’s inability to account for that loss, or even properly address it. That which remains with the artwork after study and interpretation, she asserts, is that which is mournful, what Walter Benjamin has termed “pensive.” In that light, we can start understanding crying eyes as mourning and mournful gazes, the full significance of which cannot be retrieved. The gaze that looks “for” its beholder to give him or her the tribute of some tears continues to anticipate this presentation. As such, the weeping eye 122 ¦ chapter  3

portrait confronts us with a leftover, partly resulting from art history’s methodology’s inability to account for this “present absence,” which perhaps only a dematerialized withdrawing gaze can capture. Or in the words of Kofman, philosophical discourse on art seems to aim to make us forget about art, that is, about its remainder: “There are remainders, ghosts, and phantoms wandering in limbo, things neither living nor dead, neither sensible nor intelligible, neither present not absent, but rather present in such a way that presence gives the misleading impression of absence, absent in such a way that an oppressive plenitude emanates from absence, a plenitude that occupies and entirely takes over the spectator’s gaze.”46 In the staring gaze of the empty eyes of the death mask, or of the withdrawing gaze in eye miniatures, we see most profoundly not only how a gaze is experienced as somehow detached from the actual eyes from which it originates, but moreover that it remains in all its plenitude, outliving its medium. Eye pictures demonstrate that the gaze does not exactly lie in the eye. It seems to reside outside it as well, like the crystallized tears that have escaped the place that the body used to occupy.47

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plate 1.  Anonymous, eye miniature of a woman’s eye, ca. 1790. Watercolor on ivory. Christie’s Images. plate 2.  Anonymous, eye miniature of a man’s eye, ca. 1790. Watercolor on ivory. Christie’s Images.

plate 3.  Anonymous, eye miniature, ca. 1800. Set in snuffbox by Jean-Louis Leferre (active 1803–22 in Paris). Watercolor on ivory, gold, tortoise shell. Metropolitan Museum, New York.

plate 4.  Pompeo Batoni, Portrait of Sir Sampson Gideon with Unidentified Friend, 1767. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Victoria, Australia.

plate 5.  Jean Baptiste Soyer, Unknown Woman, ca. 1790. Watercolor and gouache on ivory. Tansey Collection, Coburg.

plate 6.  Charles Hayter, A Boy, the Son of a Purser in the East India Company, ca. 1800. Watercolor on ivory. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

plate 7.  Charles Hayter, Unknown Woman and Two Children, ca. 1800. Watercolor on ivory. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

plate 8.  Thomas Hazlehurst, Portrait of a Man, ca. 1785. Watercolor on ivory. Christie’s Images. plate 9.  Thomas Hazlehurst, Portrait of Woman with Miniature of Her Husband, ca. 1785. Watercolor on ivory. Christie’s Images.

plate 10.  Jean Raoux, Young Lady Reading a Letter, ca. 1710. Oil on canvas. Musée du Petit Palais, Paris.

plate 11.  Richard Cosway, Eye Portrait of Mrs. Fitzherbert, 1786. Watercolor on ivory. Private collection.

plate 12.  Anonymous, eye miniature,   ca. 1790. Watercolor on ivory with crystals. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

plate 13.  Anonymous, eye miniature, ca. 1790. Watercolor on ivory with diamonds. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

plate 14.  Richard Cosway, Margaret Cocks, Later Margaret Smith, 1787. Oil on canvas. Huntington Library, San Marino. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Clifford E. Clinton.

plate 15.  Joseph Müller, Graf Deym von Stritetz (possibly in collaboration with Leonard Posch), Bust of Kaiser Ferdinand IV of Naples, ca. 1790. Wax, glass eyes, hair, plaster, and wood. Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Porträtsammlung, Bidarchiv und Fideikommissbibliothek,Vienna.

plate 16.  Joseph Müller, Graf Deym von Stritetz (possibly in collaboration with Leonard Posch), Bust of Emperor Leopold II, ca. 1790. Wax, glass eyes, hair, plaster, and wood. Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Porträtsammlung, Bidarchiv und Fideikommissbibliothek,Vienna.

plate 17.  Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Portrait of Queen Louisa of Prussia, 1801. Oil on canvas.

plate 18.  Anonymous, hair bracelet with eye picture of Auguste Amalia, Duchess of Leuchtenberg, 1823. Watercolor on ivory, hair, gold. Royal Collections, Stockholm.

plate 19.  Anonymous, eye miniature, verse on reverse, ca. 1815. Gouache on card. Musée Carnavalet, Paris.

plate 20.  Anonymous, eye miniature, ca. 1790. Watercolor on ivory. Christie’s Images.

plate 21.  Anonymous, eye miniature, possibly of Lord Byron, ca. 1810. Watercolor on ivory. Musée Carnavalet, Paris.

plate 22.  Thomas Phillips, Portrait of Lord Byron in Albanian Costume, 1813–14. Oil on canvas. National Portrait Gallery, London.

plate 23.  Richard Westall, Portrait of Lord Byron, 1813. Oil on canvas. National Portrait Gallery, London.

plate 24.  Elizabeth Pigot, Eye Portrait of Lord Byron, 1807. Pencil on card. Private collection.

4 intimate as extimate The Gaze as Part-Object

The truth is not that one needs a presence, to the point of doing anything to invent it; the truth is that it is very difficult to be alone. —gerard wajcman, The Birth of the Intimate I discover by reflection not only my presence to myself, but also the possibility of an “outside spectator.” —maurice merleau-ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception

A Mother’s Eye as a Watch Around 1823, Auguste Amalia, Duchess von Leuchtenberg (1788–1851), presented her daughter with a unique gift of a broad bracelet made of woven tresses of her hair. The two ends of the bracelet meet in a heavy gold clasp, adorned with leaf ornaments and small spheres set between the leaves as if they were fruits (plate 18). In the center of the clasp an eye 125

miniature portrait is mounted in an oval setting. Arched by a finely drawn eyebrow, the ice-blue right eye is surrounded by blue-gray clouds; the three curls of hair on the left are of the same hazel color as the bracelet’s wide ribbon of woven hair. The wife of Eugène de Beauharnais, son of Napoleon’s first wife, Empress Josephine, Auguste Amalia probably gave this precious gift to her young daughter Josephine (named after her infamous grandmother)1 upon her leaving home in Munich at the tender age of sixteen to marry Crown Prince Oscar of Sweden.2 The future queen must have worn her mother’s eye on her wrist as one would now wear a watch. To have a palpable part of her mother’s body touching her arm as well as her watchful gaze upon her may well have provided comfort and reassurance for the adolescent girl entering a strange court in a foreign country.3 Josephine must have been aware that the eye would always answer her furtive glances. We may picture the young princess moving, talking, and gesturing before people at the Swedish court as she would have done in front of her mother, the eye picture on her wrist watching along with her. She also possessed a similar bracelet with a regular portrait miniature of her mother, which she is wearing in a painting by Fredric Westin (fig. 46). Westin’s composition carefully articulates Josephine’s position in the Swedish royal family by means of various portraits surrounding her. A life-size oval oil picture of her husband Oscar is placed behind her, while her baby son, sitting on her lap, holds up a miniature of the present king, Karl XIV Johann. This miniature is conspicuously placed figure 46.  Fredric Westin, Queen Josephine, ca. 1826. Oil on canvas. National Museum, Stockholm.

in the center of the composition in between her breasts—which, metaphorically speaking, are supposed to foster the new dynasty to prosperity. The miniature of Josephine’s mother confirms her connection with the old royal line, as Auguste Amalia was a descendant of Gustav I. Compared to the functional hair bracelet in Westin’s oil painting, the one with the eye picture must have had a different, far more intimate meaning to Josephine. In contrast to the other eye pictures that we have discussed so far, Auguste Amalia’s eye probably did not participate in frivolous gazing games at the Swedish court, and it certainly did not serve as a mourning jewel. It may have functioned less as a jewel and more as a tool for Josephine, through which she could imagine herself seen by others through her mother’s gaze. In a letter to her sister Eugénie Hortense von Leuchtenberg, written eleven years after her arrival in Sweden, Josephine reflects on her life at court. Under the increasing weight of duty and decency, she writes of how little time she has to think and how much she enjoys her scarce hours that she can: “Nowhere I feel so whole as in my large fauteuil with some

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handwork, reflecting on what I have seen, done and thought, to come to the conclusion that I am learning.”4 Thinking herself not very bright, she describes how during these moments of solitary reflection she tries to prepare herself for unannounced encounters with others: “I form an opinion, an attitude against, a way to deal with this or that matter, which might happen, so I’m not taken by surprise.”5 In light of how scattered she felt when surrounded by the people at court, her eye wristlet may have been for her a much more complicated object than a common souvenir. Exceeding the meaning of a mere portrait, the mother’s eye may have assisted Josephine as a mechanism helping to “foresee” things, or proudly watching her as she dealt with awkward situations. Her mother’s eye could have served as an internalized link between the court’s expectations and the princess’s attempts to fulfill them. The duchess may have regarded the bracelet as not only a token of love for her daughter but also a remote instrument of control, fostering the illusion that she kept watch over her daughter’s every move. Through her sightless vision Auguste Amalia could still loom over her daughter’s movements with a single gaze that captured every detail. Josephine can observe herself via her mother’s gaze in order to prepare for encounters with others, and the bracelet-eye allows her to imagine how others are seeing her. The eye picture as instrument of such sightless surveillance allows Josephine to “split” herself so as to reassure herself, through her mother’s eye, that she is performing her duties as she should. By imagining her mother’s gaze upon her, she may have been able to protect herself from being constantly judged at court. Josephine’s eyeas-tool could have helped her develop mechanisms of self-projection against anxieties related to the strict etiquette required by her rank and distinction as well as the changeable accounting for others entailed by her position. The eye was constantly watching her, just as Lady Frances found the portrait of her beloved Byron to be her constant companion, or as Lady Connelly gazed at her sister’s picture constantly, as we have seen in the first chapter. The eye portrait can be understood here as a kind of channel, an opening comparable with that of an eyeglass through which Auguste Amalia can throw a glance at her faraway daughter from a great distance. How should we define this type of watching, this remote, privately applied panoptic technique? Though clearly a form of surveillance, it is not necessarily oppressive, and moreover, it remains a highly intimate form of looking. How does this kind of looking at oneself via the gaze of another fit within the dyad of seeing and being seen? The eye portrait 128 ¦ chapter  4

seems to undermine the distinction that this dyad proposes; seeing and being seen are modes that seem to be pushed apart to let in a third term: seeing oneself via the other’s (imagined) gaze. More than reconciling the passive and active aspects of seeing in a complete verb, as we saw at the end of chapter 2, the mother’s eye watching her child suggested a deeply embodied “watching” of the self. However, this self-watching is not imposed by a blind, anonymous panoptic machine as Jeremy Bentham would have it, whereby one either sees everything without being seen or is seen in totality without ever seeing. A different kind of dissociation of the seeing / being seen dyad is proposed by the eye portrait: “playing” with vision and setting off one’s own space by using the gaze of a loved one for protection against the gaze of the outside world. Whereas other eye portraits have emphasized the reversal of the subject and object of looking or, as we have seen, have undermined the distinction between beholding the image and being seen by it, we seem to have arrived at an understanding of a very private form of vision, a merging of the Foucauldian paradigm of panopticism and the psychoanalytic concept of projection and introspection. How can we reconcile an institutional regime of visual surveillance built on discipline with a psychoanalytic notion of seeing oneself? Exploring this question will assist me to further consider what aspect of vision becomes symptomized by eye portraits around 1800. What exactly does a watching of the self tell us about the nature of intimate vision? In this chapter I attempt to return to these questions by readdressing the relation between image and gaze, or vision and painting. In his classic Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (1983), Norman Bryson formulated a theory of painting that would replace Gombrichian dogmatism regarding the perceptual schemata and the essential copy, and did so on the basis of Foucault’s theory of the gaze and the glance and Lacan’s notion of the gaze. However incompatible the work on vision of these two thinkers may seem, Bryson has succeeded in articulating a theory of painting to explain the disappearance of the body as the site of the image, all the while providing an alternative in the concept of an embodied vision that the painting offers its viewer. Bryson’s now foundational text contains many moments of confusion, however. It remains unclear whether he is discussing a notion of vision as solicited by painting, as based upon painting, as conditioned by the artist’s perception and practice, or as exercised and actively chosen by a viewer-as-agent, and these various registers continue to overlap in the course of his argument. But rather than being a flaw in Bryson’s argument, intimate as extimate ¦ 129

this confusion is symptomatic of the fundamental problem involved in theorizing vision. It is precisely the two-sidedness of vision, mapping out a field between image and eye, that does not allow for a proper unraveling. This collapse of the viewer’s and the painting “look,” as Heidegger would have it, or this moment of indiscretion, as Schlosser would say, so central to eye pictures, is the subject of this chapter’s analysis. My starting point is Auguste Amalia’s eye portrait, which, as a tool for Josephine, is in fact an instrument of reception as much as transmission. It looks at Josephine as its exclusive owner, absorbing her image to the extent that something seems to go out of it as well. It is a detached gaze that guides the princess by reflecting images of her back to her. Melanie Klein’s theory of the part-object and Lacan’s radicalization of her findings in his notion of the gaze as part-object will be helpful in understanding both the split between eye and gaze and the dyad between seeing and being seen. Ultimately, what I would like to attempt in this chapter, following Sarah Kofman in this regard, is to formulate a psychoanalytic aesthetics by relating to the field of painting in general my observations on what eye portraits are capable of offering. As we will see, the intimacy brought about by eye miniatures has a particular resonance for our approach to painting more broadly. Drawing on the work of Gérard Wajcman, I will explain how painting is able to negotiate a zone between inside and outside, located under the shadow of the gaze, where intimate vision can be found as resulting from an image that protects us from the Gaze.

The Part-Object: Projection and Introjection The Musée Carnavalet holds an eye miniature that has a short verse engraved on the reverse (ca. 1800, plate 19): “Thy friend put in thy bosom / Wears her eye still in thy Heart / That she may see whats there” [sic]. Banal as this rhyme may sound, it gets at how the ways the depicted gaze can achieve an internalized, embodied “watching.” The eye is here capable of transforming into a kind of embodied peephole or eyeglass, functioning almost like a camera that, instead of looking “at” the wearer, looks “into”him or her. Its vision operates in a double way, by projecting onto its owner the image that she thinks the sitter has of her, which she subsequently incorporates as a self-image to emulate as well as hold on to. The short inscription on the trinket’s reverse side suggests a kind of incorporated intimate vision that has broken out of the minicircuit in which gazes are met, as we have seen in previous chapters, and obtained the power to actually pierce through the body of the loved one to see what is 130 ¦ chapter  4

inside. According to this poem, the eye depicted on its obverse side should be worn not on the body but in one’s bosom, so that it can see ever so deeply into the heart, to become part of the loved one’s body. This imaginary connection made by the gaze between one’s deep interior and the outside world can be further observed with recourse to Melanie Klein’s concept of the part-object, which she developed in her study of infant object-relations in the 1930s. She is particularly concerned with the dense, multilayered, and highly complicated processes by which a subject experiences the separation of the love object, in the case of infancy the mother’s body. Klein analyzes the infant’s negotiation of the limits of its body and the world outside by means of the concepts of introjection, projection, and projective identification, terms that are helpful for our purposes. A subject is never truly separated from its love object, Klein argues, and throughout her oeuvre she attempts to clarify the interactions between feelings inside and objects outside the body. She argues that essential to the feelings we call love is an identification with the object, which goes hand in hand with anxiety about its disintegration and sadness about its loss. One of Klein’s major discoveries and contributions to Freudian psychoanalysis is her insight that conflicting impulses of love and hate are already manifested in infants as encounters with the world that are both satisfying and frustrating. Whereas for Freud, repression was critical for the formation of the psyche in its function of keeping uncomfortable feelings away from the ego, Klein focused on the development in infants of early mechanisms of defense against frustration and anxiety. She observes that an infant has various options at its disposal to deny or repudiate what it experiences as a threatening reality. Due to the infant’s underdeveloped capacities of perception, along with an exclusive concern for immediate gratification, he or she will establish a relationship or attachment to a part rather than the whole of the mother’s body. The first such attachment is to the breast—in Kleinian psychoanalysis the prototypical “part-object.” Feeding from the breast may result in the infant’s incorporation of that satisfying feeling as wholesome, as if it had a good, complete breast inside it. However, due to the baby’s fragile ego, it may be shaken by anxiety, Klein writes, by the breast’s frustrating qualities—because it may suddenly disappear, it can be transformed from a wholesome and good object into a bad one. As a consequence, the baby can become very anxious that it will receive retaliation from the breast. Klein insists that the breast can even be experienced as the infant’s persecutor. Thus, in self-protection, the infant splits the self into a good, gratifying part and a bad, frustrating part to connect alternately with the good and the bad intimate as extimate ¦ 131

parts of the breast. For Klein, it is this division that eventually results in feelings of love and hate, the conflicting impulses that form the basis of her psychoanalytic model.6 Endowed in fantasy with traits comparable to that of a whole person—reassuring, benevolent, and so on—good and bad part-objects relate to the small child through various mechanisms of what Klein has called projection, introjection, and projective identification. In projection, the infant projects part of the feelings and experiences that he or she has split from onto the object, filling it with them, so to speak. With introjection, the infant takes into himself or herself feelings perceived from the object. In contrast, the breast’s badness (as it is capable of leaving the infant) and the infant’s aggression toward it are projected onto the outside world, with the result that that part of the breast becomes hateful and hating.7 In her book Melanie Klein (2001), Julia Kristeva explains that for Klein the fragile ego, never fully separated from its object, “incessantly consumes the breast from within and ejects the breast into the outside world by constructing-vacating itself while constructing-vacating the Other.”8 Kristeva stresses that the infant constructs and deconstructs the boundaries between inside and outside by means of the part-object that, though it exists as a complete object in the outside world, is simultaneously an image that has been constructed within (63). The separation between subject and object is never a state but always a hybrid, a continuing process of projecting and introjection connecting inner and outer spheres. The infant projects the gratifying, nourishing experience of sucking and drinking milk outward, onto the mother’s breast, so this object-relation is established simultaneously by a flowing inward and a projecting outward. This inward-outward dynamic, sustaining the internal image as well as the real object, can be seen in internalized vision as well, whereby the gaze is an actual presence as well as an imagined look upon oneself that has been internalized as image. Not only can an image of the object become internalized, as the clichéd verse on the reverse side of the Carnavalet eye portrait indicates, but the image of the loved one’s gaze is itself able to penetrate the body “to see whats inside.” The verse speaks of a desire to plant one’s gaze inside the loved one’s body, as a projection “into” rather than “onto” that body. In “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms” (1946), Klein makes a first attempt to distinguish between projection onto and into an object. Analyzing the infant’s aggressive desires to attack the mother’s body, Klein describes how split-off parts expelled in hatred (such as feces) are not so 132 ¦ chapter  4

much projected “onto” the mother as propelled “into” her. This distinction resulted for Klein in the notion of projective identification (a concept that eventually was further developed by some of Klein’s followers, such as Wilfred Bion and Thomas Ogden). Projective identification is a multistep process whereby the ego first projects its feelings onto the object in order to possess it. Such possession results from the infant’s desire to free itself from unwanted, threatening parts of the self. The infant can also try to protect the good parts of its ego from the outside world, by identifying with the object, for instance, while feeding from the breast, to the extent that the ego partly “becomes like” the object that has already filled its tiny body with milk. In nursing, the part of the breast that was initially split off from the ego and made part of the object is now reinternalized, or “drunk in,” so to speak. The fragile ego is therefore ruled by the fundamental instability brought about by the splitting of the breast into good and bad parts, with the good part constantly ingested while the bad part is constantly rejected. This process results in conflicting emotions: the infant is needy toward the bit it has cannibalized out of love but is simultaneously threatened and persecuted by what has now become part of himself or herself. This process of possession, of becoming and then rejecting the object, never reaches a particular stasis but is a continuous movement of drinking, taking in, rejecting, and hating. This instability or oscillation of flowing-inward and projecting-outward as a cannibalizing process that Klein describes in terms of the breast has been applied to vision by Otto Fenichel. Working along lines similar to Klein’s regarding the connection between the body’s interior and the exterior world of things, Fenichel attempts to articulate this relationship in purely optical terms. In his essay “The Scoptophilic Instinct and Identification” (1935), he analyzes the expression “to devour with one’s eyes” as an equivalent of intent gazing, thereby formulating the operations of what he calls, following Freud, the scoptophilic instinct.9 The underlying tendency of the scoptophilic instinct, Fenichel claims, is the idea that we wish what we see to enter our body. Having coined the term “respiratory introjection” to denote a form of internalization through the lungs that involves inhaling the same air as someone else, as well as nervous coughing, Fenichel extends his discourse on the meaning of the body’s internalizations by proposing the possibility of ocular introjection, the incorporation of a thing seen through the eye. Wittingly or unwittingly he echoes medieval ideas about the power of sight over the body, such as in the warning that pregnant women should not look at ugly things out of fears that they will then bear monstrous babies. Obviously, it is not the case that one intimate as extimate ¦ 133

wishes to become any object one sees. Perception and introjection are by no means identical mechanisms; however, Fenichel considers them to be closely intertwined to the extent that the eye is the organ par excellence for the reception of (images of) objects. Whereas with respiratory introjection particles in the air entering the body through the nose are real, Fenichel explains, we should be well aware that objects entering through the eye are not. Though he relies too heavily on an equation of eye and penis, popular at the time of his writing but not useful for us here, he makes a more speculative point that is highly interesting. Fenichel proposes that there is a primitive kind of looking, a mode of “archaic” seeing in infancy, during which the infant is unable to distinguish between the object seen and its own body. This assertion implies that visual perception cannot be fully divorced from the perception of one’s body as a whole. Though he nowhere makes this claim, Fenichel in fact proposes to apply Klein’s theories to visual perception. The ultimate consequence of his theory (which he does not draw in this essay) is that the gaze should be considered, like the breast, as a part-object. As part-object, the gaze, capable of devouring a desirable seen object, can also pose a threat as a devouring eye, to take away (or “bite off,” as Fenichel suggests) part of the self by looking. With his idea of “archaic” vision, Fenichel defines a state that Lacan later terms the infant’s corpse morcelé, the fragmented body that cannot yet perceive itself as whole or distinguish itself from its environment. The state Fenichel describes, however, is a purely optical one, where the (good) object seen is understood as part of the infant’s own body, or rather, as a way of entering into the seen object such that “observation takes place by way of identification” (332). If we look again at the eye of Auguste Amalia we can get a better idea of how it may have been used by Josephine as an instrument of selfprotection through the mechanisms of perception and introjection. The mother’s eye “gives” Josephine a vision of herself that she breathes in, so to speak, and this gift enables her to split herself so she can imagine seeing herself as others may see her. As Klein demonstrated, the dynamic goes both ways: what a mother can offer her child via her breast immediately becomes the ground for the child’s projection. When we consider the eye portrait as a panoptic technique, the mother’s eye, while a figure of warning, is not threatening. In her entry on the part-object in Formless: A User’s Guide (1997), Rosalind Krauss points out that the aim of Klein’s theory is ultimately “to make part objects agents of intersubjective relations, and thus players in a drama between persons.”10 Auguste Amalia’s eye exhibits 134 ¦ chapter  4

just such agency, playing a formative role in the relation between mother and daughter, and hence between Josephine and herself as a relation between her and the world. The eye picture reveals how, as part-object, the gaze turns into an agent that, in enabling relations with the outside world, provides a self-image. Conditioned via the gaze of the other, this self-image gets introjected. As such, eye miniatures as portrayals of the gaze should be understood as deeply embedded in a loop-structure in which projection and introjection, ingestion and rejection determine the relation between gaze and gazed-at, seeing and the seen, in a gazing game that has indeed become serious. They reveal how the gaze as part-object functions in establishing a zone through which relations between inner self and outside world can be formed. Classic subject-object oppositions get blurred in the alternative, much more complicated relationships that more properly account for the intricate ways in which the seeing self is caught up, and we may even say made up, in what she or he sees. In their critique of Klein’s definition of the part-object, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari described the part-object as a kind of receiving and transmitting machine. Rejecting Klein’s strict reading of part-objects as an amalgam of heterogeneous internal objects that are representations of the maternal body and remain a part from the point of view of wholeness, Deleuze and Guattari desubjectify Klein’s concept when they see the bits as parts of impersonal desiring machines that at particular moments of connection aim at ingesting and ejecting what they call energy flows, such as milk or feces. In the course of its function, the part-object is transformed from a reception machine to a transmission machine. In light of this criticism of Klein, eye miniatures can be considered as being not merely embedded in operations that Klein calls projective identification, but as agents capable of generating such operations through transmission by mechanisms of ingestion and ejection. A set of operational modes of receiving and “transmitting” gazes through eye miniatures can thus be set in motion. In the previous chapter we saw how eye portraits, especially those that cry, can be conceived of as agents of looking once they demand a certain response from their particular viewers. I wonder whether the notion of the part-object will allow us to think beyond the eye miniature’s agency or demand toward its function in negotiating the highly complex relation between the beholder and the visual world. Lacan’s sound elaboration on the gaze as part-object will assist us to further examine the potential role and function of eye portraits as instruments or agents in the subject’s place in the world. intimate as extimate ¦ 135

The Gaze as Part-Object In the course of his development of psychoanalysis via a return to Freud, Lacan extended the list of three Freudian/Kleinian part-objects—the breast, feces, and the phallus—by adding the gaze, the voice, and the phoneme. One reason that Lacan included the gaze in the list of part-objects is because, like the voice (but unlike the breast), the gaze lacks a specular image. Even when we look at our own image in the mirror, our eyes may quickly shift focus from one eye to the other without ever managing to glimpse our gaze. As a result, our self-image carries within it a fundamental aspect of alterity.11 One consequence of this lack of a specular image is that these objects fail to contribute to our narcissistic illusion of wholeness; thus something remains lacking in our constitution. This exclusion of the gaze from our self-image, however, is for the subject the condition for normal access to reality. Our sense of reality would start to disintegrate once the gaze, or the voice, was included in it, that is, once the subject starts to hear voices or feel gazes resting upon him or her that do not derive from another subject but seem to emerge from reality as such, which Lacan calls the Other. If the gaze and voice as objects were included in reality, we would enter a stage of psychosis in which we would hear the voice of the Other addressing us, or we would be haunted by a fear of becoming transparent, watched by an omnipresent gaze that is not the gaze of a subject. In the case of psychosis, the transparent subject could not see or face what is looking at him or her. The object-gaze to which the subject is exposed is effectively a blind spot within the field of the visible, a hole that can be detected only as absent, an exteriority per se. Along the same lines of repression, in the field of acoustics the object-voice is silence. In Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (1994), Joan Copjec states that part-objects are, in fact, appendages of the body from which we separate ourselves in order to constitute ourselves as subjects. “In order to constitute ourselves we must, in other words, throw out, reject our nonselves,” she writes.12 The gaze as part-object is therefore that which must be kept outside our reality if it is not to disintegrate, as well as that which, as a blind spot, constitutes the symbolic field in visual terms. What Lacan calls the Gaze with a capital G is the field of perception that revolves around this blind spot, around the appendage of the body from which we have separated ourselves in order to exist as a subject. The Lacanian Gaze is a visual equivalent of the symbolic field of the Other: a realm of structures, laws, and patterns that, like a language, precedes birth. By entering this realm we are “subjected” to the structures 136 ¦ chapter  4

mapped out by it, and as such we are born as “subjects.” Our perception within the field of the Other is therefore always a battle with the Gaze: we struggle with the limitations of the structure that is laid out for us. As we always pursue a position within the visual from which we assume mastery over the visible world, every act of looking engages in silent combat with the Gaze that tyrannizes the eye, holding us firmly in its web of visual signifiers. We as subjects, however, always wish to see more (just as we always wish to say more), and as a consequence we can never accept the limitations of our visual organs, nor of the visual regime oppressing us. Our vision, therefore, is split. Our eyes are never satisfied, as our perception does not quite seem to cover the field of vision. Something escapes our perception which is nevertheless in the field of vision, something that we are aware of but only in its absence, which Lacan calls the Gaze. The Gaze is out there, on the side of things; however, when seen from the side of things, we as subjects would not simply turn into objects, as Sartre would have it. For both Lacan and Sartre the eye is a mere support for the gaze. An empty house can be a support for the gaze as well, Sartre writes, when it appears to “look” at us from its empty windows.13 Whereas Foucault can be said to take the scanning, superficial, sightless omnivision of Bentham’s panopticon as his model of vision, Sartre takes voyeurism as its foundation, or, to formulate this even more precisely, secret (monocular) peeping through a keyhole. For the philosopher, the voyeur, initially losing himself in what he sees to the extent that he is reduced to nothingness, suddenly becomes aware of being watched himself; his return to consciousness, or rather to objecthood, fills him with shame under the gaze of the other. The subject thus becomes an object, and this realization causes anxiety. Different from Sartre, Lacan reasons that due to the blind spot in our perception, the subject will fundamentally misrecognize what she or he sees, failing to realize what escapes perception, an absence that can still be located “in” her or his vision. In fact, Lacan suggests in Seminar XI that Sartre does not go far enough when he claims that the subject is reduced to an object under the gaze of another, because he does not realize the immensity of visibility (or the Gaze). The problem with Sartre’s view is that he does not question the subject-object relation but simply assumes the transformation of subject into its opposite, an object, under the gaze of another subject. Ultimately, Sartre theorizes vision on the basis of objectivity, whereas Lacan questions the function of vision insofar as it provides the conditions of subjectivity. Thus one of the most fundamental differences between Lacan and Sartre is that the Lacanian Gaze is not a seen gaze but a gaze imagined in the field intimate as extimate ¦ 137

of the Other. This Gaze cannot possibly be located in a support but is everywhere, that is, everywhere where we are not. What we fundamentally miss is that our position in the world is determined by our visibility, not our point of view. We as subjects are conditioned not by what we see but by how we are seen from the side of things. From that side, we are not each a distinct object among other things, as Sartre would have it, but a tiny speck in the field of visibility as a whole. From the other side of our perceptual field, our appearance is blended in, in the field of the Other, comparable to a kind of mimicry or camouflage. Our contours do not stand out against the immense visual backdrop of visibility when we are seen from the side of the Gaze. The Gaze, which encompasses this visibility, thus structurally annihilates our position, which is, as a principle, reduced to one pixel among millions, a mere stain or speck in this three-dimensional field of visibility. This is what Lacan means when he famously states that he is not “that punctiform being located at the geometral point from which the perspective is grasped,” but is rather looked at from all sides.14 Lacan’s model of vision is a trap and as such has more in common with panopticism and Foucault’s claim that “visibility is a trap”15 than either thinker would have wanted to admit. But whereas for Foucault there is no way out of Bentham’s prison, no escape from the power of surveillance in general, Lacan offers two ways out of his regime of the Gaze. The first escape route is to tame the gaze through painting, and the second is by playing with what Lacan calls the image-screen, an intersection between our eye and the Gaze out there, by means of which we as subjects obtain some agency as to the mode of our representation.16 It is with regard to the latter that the eye portrait as tool may potentially have had an crucial function as a precursor for Lacan’s notion of being “photo-graphed” avant la lettre. We can speculate how that would have worked when we better understand how for Lacan the gaze as part-object operates. In contrast to Klein’s focus on the object as partly representing the parental body, Lacan is interested in the function that produces part-objects. He is less concerned with part-objects as meaningful things and more with the relationships between subject and world they allow to be established, or, more precisely, with the hybrid zone that connects and separates the body from the part-object. The part-object is, in fact, produced, Lacan reasons, not when part of the breast is experienced as being part of the infant’s body but when it is withdrawn from it. This separation or cutoff is the result of what he calls the anatomical mark. Whereas for Klein the prototypical part-object is the breast, Lacan focuses more on the infant’s lips grasping and letting go of the nipple while sucking. Sucking results from parts of 138 ¦ chapter  4

both mother and child, when the anatomical function of the lips connects with the milk flow, which gets “cut off ” when the lips let go. The lips form an anatomical mark, a pulsating margin of the body, where outside and inside are not defined but are constantly formed by a cutoff: just as lips contract and relax their connection with the breast, and the rim of the anus “produces” feces by opening and closing, the slit formed by the eyelids “produces” the gaze. As we will see, it is precisely the function of the Gaze as part-object with which we as subjects can play.17 In the context of the Lacanian notion of the part-object, we may better understand the gaze as in a process of continuous “cutting off ” when we consider the eyes’ incessant blinking. Like the infant’s mouth opening and closing to let in the flow of milk, the slit formed by the eyelid is the anatomical mark that, through its covering and uncovering, allows the eyeball to release the gaze. One’s gaze is thus always cut by a thousand slits of the eyelids, an endless process of opening and closing, which paradoxically we barely notice in others nor when we stare at ourselves in the mirror. Indeed, we are not aware that our reflected self-image as a whole is distorted by our never-ending blinking. What’s more, we barely notice our own blinking as the unstoppable slashing fractions of nonseeing slicing through our field of vision. Blinking allows our gaze to leave the eye while remaining somehow “part” of our body, as our perception of the world seems to continue without interruption. Indeed, not only does our gaze “leave” our eye, but vision also enters, as if it were a flow of milk, so to speak, in a dynamism that goes both ways: inward and outward. If we recall from chapter 2 that many eyes are depicted as if peeping through a spyglass, we can imagine the miniature’s frame as a kind of aperture allowing for a two-way flow of “looks” that are as much thrown out of the rim as projected into it. However, there is no such two-way movement visible in eye portraits. The intense close-up of Auguste Amalia’s eye, albeit in miniature, may emerge as a kind of opening channel between self and other, mother and child, lover and loved one, subject and object, the world and me, my seeing and your watching. However, while it is a receiving and transmitting instrument (rather than machine) in the hand of Josephine, her mother’s eye is precisely not blinking. It is like all other eye portraits, in whose staring, nonblinking gaze—and their beholder’s look upon them— we see vision arrested. There is no dynamic transmission-and-reception, no pulsating or gushing movement as with the flow of milk, and yet this eye takes in what it sees, as if all it wants to do is look. It is a looking stopped in the flow that the eyelid slashed through, as a stream that is incessantly yet invisibly dammed up each time the eyelids lower. And we seem to see intimate as extimate ¦ 139

right in between two such moments: between one blink and the next lies the stare of an open eye that will never close again, that will continue to look as if looking with its entire being. The German writer Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811) describes how he experienced a kind of arrested vision in front of The Monk by the Sea by Caspar David Friedrich (1808–10, Alte National Gallery, Berlin). Standing in front of this now famous canvas, the writer reveals himself as seriously mystified by what he finds, or rather does not find, in this painting. The confusion results from the painting’s boundlessness: “It has nothing but a frame for a foreground,” he exclaims, subsequently stating that with the wideness of the composition the artist has opened a new “path” in the field of art. Admittedly this is a highly Romantic text in which Kleist feels himself dwarfed by the immensity encompassed by the painting, and yet his confusion results in more than a glimpse of the sublime. What Kleist saw overwhelmed him to such a degree that he felt as if he were in a mode of total, uninterrupted looking, a complete and surrendering gaze “so when one looks at it, it is as if one’s eyelids have been cut away,” he wrote.18 That which for Lacan was essential for the partiality of the gaze and its objecthood, the eyelid with which the body involuntarily cuts off the gaze, is here imagined by Kleist as cut off itself: a lidless, uncut, ongoing gaze. If closed eyes stand in contrast to open ones, and blindness is the opposite of seeing, then Kleist’s eyelidless gaze is vision’s superlative, a perception received by an eye opened wider than its lids would permit, an eye more than open. Whereas the infant’s sucking lips may widen to let out a forceful cry, eyes that no longer blink widen until the eyeballs seem to have been undressed. This gaze is no longer capable of covering or shielding itself with its lid; it cannot withdraw or keep itself on the side of the body. Kleist’s gaze is one that has cut loose and that, released from its bridles, runs off, unstoppable, irretrievable, always following what it wishes to see. Though less wild than Kleist imagined it, the unblinking stare of Auguste Amalia is as unstoppable, holding on to her daughter’s image which her actual eye had to give up on years before, and all the while her daughter holds on to her own, albeit changing, self-image through her gaze. The moment in which Kleist experiences what for lack of a better term I call “superlative vision” enables us to get closer to the problem of how we should theorize this relationship of gaze to picture, or how a theory of the gaze’s interaction with painting can be made understandable only when a painting serves as its backdrop, or rather, projection screen. Only then can the gaze slowly obtain something like a contour: vague, sketchy lines drawn over the surface, by means of which it starts to stand out. 140 ¦ chapter  4

In his typical manner of phrasing, which is as exact as it is fleeting, Kleist comes close to describing looking as a problem of painting, as well as a problem for painting. He writes how his unbridled gaze went “out there” in the field of visibilities, all the while residing neither in his eye nor in the world, but in the boundless monotony of Friedrich’s painting. It was in the painting that his gaze could run wild, and where it could come to an unblinking stop, where it could go uncovered, and where it was ultimately found. The extent to which the painting imposes itself upon Kleist, and, alternatively, the way his own gaze opens up to a total vision that knows no bounds, is the main topic on which the writer deeply reflects in his short text. The painting is apparently so overwhelming that Kleist starts describing his vision as if he actually sees it: how splendid it feels to stand on the shore, under a cheerless sky, and to stare at a limitless expanse of water, a trope that Diderot was fond of using as well. He hears his own voice in the billowing wind and roar of the tide: “However,” Kleist writes, “this is impossible before this painting. . . . What I should have found in the painting I could find only between myself and the painting, that is to say, a demand the painting makes on me but does not fulfill; and so I became the monk and the painting became the dune, but that on which I gazed with yearning, the sea, was not there at all” (1032). He realizes that what he found in the painting may have been a projection of his own feelings, yet at the same time the canvas is not merely a ground against which such a projection can be made. The painting makes a demand, and it is not that he, Kleist, is unable to fulfill it, but that the painting as such fails to meet it. Demanding and fulfilling are for Kleist part of the same site, or rather, of the same sight: that which the image asks the image does not give, and what he observes to be in the painting he knows he should have found between himself and the painting. But despite his unblinking eyes, he has not found what he should have. Is Kleist’s experience in front of Friedrich’s painting what Lacan calls a taming of the gaze, the pacifying, Apollonian effect of painting on the gaze?19 What the Romantic writer realizes is that the deep yearning he feels inside is caused by his intently looking at something in the painting that was not entirely there. It could not have been located “there,” because the painting has offered a field that is boundless, without end. Lacan would argue that it is in painting that we can see the gaze in its absence: “In any picture, it is precisely in seeking the gaze in each of its points that you will see it disappear,” he writes.20 However, Kleist notices more than just this absence when referring to a space between himself and the painting which the latter through its boundlessness was able to allow, a kind of channel, partly lying in the painting, partly coming intimate as extimate ¦ 141

out of his own feelings, that ultimately “cuts off ” his eyelids. Friedrich’s painting gave him something that filled him while remaining unfulfilled, a hunger for more to see that could not be stilled despite the boundlessness of the image and his lidless vision. He was given something by the picture to feed on. What Kleist in fact describes is comparable to what Adrian Stokes would argue more than a century later, namely that we as viewers feed on an aesthetic experience—a feeding that remains inexhaustible.

The Nursing Picture A onetime analysand of Klein, Adrian Stokes became her disciple much to the dismay of many of his initial supporters, among them Ernst Gombrich and Kenneth Clark and was among the first to apply Kleinian psychoanalysis to aesthetic experience, in particular her concepts of projection and introjection. As early as the 1920s, he started using psychoanalytical theory as the basis for what later became his aesthetic criticism. Influenced by Klein’s idea of the part-object as well as by Kant’s epistemology, Stokes was convinced that subject and object are interdependent concepts that have no meaning when separated. As a consequence, Stokes argued that once we discover, in infancy, that the world surrounding us is not an extension of the self and that there exists a gaping division between subject and object, we seek “to rival the externality of things” for the rest of our lives.21 Taking quite literally Freud’s phrase that the ego is in fact a position in space on the border between outside and inside, Stokes sees the surrounding world as a medium comparable to a canvas “on which to apply ourselves, by which we project, transmute and as well satisfy biological needs [and without with] we cannot conceive the flow of the mind any more than the activity of the body.”22 This canvas-projected vision is an objective link to the external world that remains, as image, essentially flat. Stokes conceives of projection again quite literally as what occurs in cinema, with the world as a screen on which pictures of the mind are projected out of one’s eyes. Within this conception of vision and the world, Stokes sees aesthetic experience as close to the infant’s internalization of the breast as described by Klein: “[I]n aesthetic experience we have something inexhaustible on which we feed, a pabulum without surfeit or waste product: something—and, remember, all experience comes within these terms—something nourishing, beneficent, that denotes at the same time an independent object, excellent or loved.”23 In light of Stokes’s idea of experiencing an art object as somehow nourishing because it offers us a canvas onto which we project our needs, we can imagine Josephine, watching 142 ¦ chapter  4

her mother’s eye picture tied to her wrist, finding the picture quite beneficent and inexhaustible, as it will always answer her anxious glances. Moreover, as object it becomes reinternalized through projective identification, thus tying even closer the utter exterior of the visible world to the deeper parts of the self. Driven by a similar interest in inside and outside as perceptual zones, Jean Paris goes even further than Stokes when he claims that artworks actively contribute to perception. His L’espace et le regard (1965) has never enjoyed the attention it deserves and is now known primarily as one of the major sources of inspiration for Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas on faciality, which they have worked out in A Thousand Plateaus (1980). In their explanation of what they call the abstract machine of faciality, they discuss many of the same examples that Paris studies in great depth in his book, borrowing heavily from his at times baffling argument about the structuring of pictorial space by the gaze.24 Tracing what he calls a prehistory of the gaze, Paris distinguishes between three instances of gazing, informed by Benveniste’s language theory, as each corresponds to a personal pronoun. The frontal look (“I”) as it has been recorded by the early powerful stare of Christ Pantocrator in the Byzantine era, the dual or integrated gaze evoked by a figure in profile (“you”), and the intersection of multiple gazes of figures and the unifying beholder (“they”) each determine a different complex or regime of visual space. The gaze permeating painting is not dependent upon and does not limit itself to depicted eyes; it is an intentional stare that gives things its shape, for example as the unseen, invisible gaze of things in seventeenthcentury still lifes, or the way time is spatialized in cubism. Like Sartre, Paris separates the eye from the gaze, asserting that once we see eyes (in painting or in reality) the gaze, in fact, disappears from view. But in painting, the gaze remains perceptible as an outline or a structure, sometimes reminiscent of the pattern of the face. Though far-reaching and at times slightly inconsistent, Paris’s argument is compelling when he examines a series of ocular metaphors in painting, in particular the breast. Though he does not explicitly acknowledge a Kleinian influence, her theories on the part-object are in line with his understanding of the breast as a hybrid of inside and outside that establishes spatial connections between the realm of painting and the world. This connection becomes for him especially apparent in lactation imagery, where the fountain of milk spouting from the Virgin Mary’s breast forms a pathway for the gaze. Paris pushes his argument to a further extreme when he asserts that breasts in early modern torsos and nudes produce intimate as extimate ¦ 143

a faciality of the body by “looking out” at us. It is not just the equation of eyes and breasts that interest him here but the fact that, by looking out, the body of the figure itself turns into a ground for a zigzagging of intersecting glances between the figures within the painting as much as by the gaze of the viewer complementing the image.25 Various instances of the gaze thus form a grid against the ground of the body, an invisible structure that underlies all pictorial composition. These observations lead Paris to claim that paintings are created according to the controlling power of the gaze, which ultimately structures all space in painting. In addition to the breast, various ocular metaphors are discussed, including the halo, which magnifies and multiplies the look in order to demonstrate the ways the gaze structure space in painting. For instance, in Giotto’s St. Francis Giving His Cloak to a Beggar (fig. 47), Paris observes (as Millard Meiss did before him) how St. Francis’s eye has been placed by Giotto at the center of his halo, at a spot marking the intersection of two strong diagonals outlining the landscape in the background.26 Spatial composition coincides with the organization of the figures’ gazes to unite, through the gaze of saint upon mortal, heaven and earth, as well as church and city. Paris argues that in Giotto’s fresco it is the landscape that “sees,” looking at its beholder through the porch of the church or the windows in the city’s buildings. Because the landscape as such “looks back” at us and allows us to see, Paris reasons that we as viewers take in that landscape not passively but actively, when we fully partake in what we see. Our eyes soak up the visual, Paris explains, as our lungs absorb air, by rhythmically integrating our bodies into the environment. Taking a different direction from Deleuze and Guattari, Paris further develops the idea that perception is comparable to breathing, a connection that we have seen Fenichel make as well. Unlike Fenichel, who elaborates on the interfaces of respiratory and scopophilic introjection in purely psychoanalytic terms, taking the internalization of a seen object as point of departure, Paris is interested in how painting can help define the difference between the organ and the function of vision. Following Maurice Merleau-Ponty in this respect, he wonders whether we should search for a philosophy of vision figured by paintings as such, and formulates a then new (and now widely accepted) theory of how the gaze structures space in (early modern) painting. Inspired by Henri Michaux’s remark “Sometimes I breathe harder and all of a sudden, with the aid of my continual absent-mindedness, the world rises with my chest” (“Parfois je respire plus fort et tout à coup ma distraction continuelle aidant, le monde se soulève avec ma poitrine”), Paris makes the rather bold statement that the eye breathes just as the chest or 144 ¦ chapter  4

figure 47.  Giotto di Bondone, St. Francis Giving His Cloak to a Beggar, ca. 1305. Fresco. Scrovegni, Arena Chapel, Padua.

the torso sees. The gaze for Paris is thus active, in that it exercises power over the visual world, as well as passive, in that it absorbs the world as if it were air. Extending its effects into the landscape surrounding us, or onto the body as looking breasts, the gaze passes through the eye but is never a mere function of the organ. If we consider eye miniatures as artworks that, through their demand of certain responses from their beholders, intervene in the received, rigid separation between subject and object, we may wonder how a conception of seeing as an active as well as passive act comparable to breathing could intimate as extimate ¦ 145

assist us in formulating how precisely such intervention occurs. Pictorial imagery “falling” into the eye may come to us as an ongoing flow reminiscent of lungs taking in air, and it is precisely this in-and-out-transmission quality of the exchange that ultimately blurs the distinction between the subject and object of looking. Essential for this ocular transmission to happen, according to Paris, is the faciality of the image: the fact that it looks back at us.27 While Deleuze and Guattari insist that the faciality of the image is not based on resemblance with a face, Paris, remaining closer to figurative art, studies the effect of ocular metaphors on the formation of the visual grid, not realistically painted eyes. Despite their emphasis on representations of looking or signs of faciality rather than actual eyes, I believe that eye portraits, because of their unique composition and scale, can make a particular contribution to the discussion of ocular transmission. If it is indeed this breathing or transmission essential to our perception that we can see in painting, as Paris claims, eye portraits do have theoretical potential for the understanding of painting as such. In order to articulate the eye picture’s position within the realm of painting, and its potential linking of subject and object of painting, I will turn to Norman Bryson’s theory of pictorial perception, which, as no other, dissects the intertwined relation between painting and the gaze.

Painting as a Product of the Gaze and the Glance In his now classic Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (1983), Bryson argues against the then (and still) widespread dogma promulgated by Ernst Gombrich that painting is a record of a perception. Deeming Gombrich’s approach in Art and Illusion: Towards A Psychology of Perception (1960) fundamentally wrong, Bryson dismantles Gombrich’s dominant idea by deconstructing, step by step, the doctrines of the natural attitude, perceptualism, and the essential copy that support this idea. In lieu of Gombrich’s doctrines, Bryson makes a strong case for the notion that painting is a sign, which has been considered the new basis of art history and visual culture ever since. In the chapter “The Gaze and the Glance,” Bryson claims that Gombrich and others have dehistoricized the relation of the viewer to the painting. He promises to reinstall a historicized relation but not before he has outlined Gombrich’s attitude toward the viewer as a trend of Western art history since the Renaissance. This tendency to dehistoricize the viewer has produced a particular type of Western painting, and these paintings, in their turn, have also produced a particular type of Western viewer. Is Gombrich to blame for that? 146 ¦ chapter  4

Following the then-revolutionary line of thinking that painting is discursive and its signs operate according to a logic similar to that of a language, Bryson observes that Western painting is predicated on the suppression of deixis. The body of the painter, as well as that of the viewer, has been ignored as the site of image-production and image-consummation. Both are supposed to unite in a moment that Bryson calls the Founding Perception, when the painter’s gaze presumably arrests moving elements in his visual field to record them in an eternal standstill on the panel or canvas. This establishes a point of view in which the viewer ideally unites his or her gaze with the vantage point of the artist to see the image. Alberti’s perspectival model supports this pictorial prototype: The logic of the Gaze is therefore subject to two great laws: the body (of the painter, of the viewer) is reduced to a single point, the macula of the retinal surface; and the moment of the Gaze (for the painter, for the viewer) is placed outside duration. Spatially and temporally, the act of viewing is constructed as the removal of the dimensions of space and time, as the disappearance of the body: the construction of an acies mentis, the punctual viewing subject. (italics in the original)28

What Bryson argues against, in addition to Gombrichian archetypes, is the idea of perspective as a kind of instrument that has transformed the subject into an object, that is to say, into a point. The fictional vanishing point anticipates a physical point of view that denies the actual body of the viewer as much as it denies its time or its space, and thus assumes to be the image as a transcendent point of vision: the Gaze. The logic of the Gaze follows the logic of representation. Merging Lacan’s terminology from Seminar XI with Foucauldian paradigms of panopticism, the Gaze is for Bryson an empty, disembodied, dehistoricized, yet all-seeing point of view ruling over and thus determining a type of painting of arrested time. The frozen moment in the picture is further enhanced by an absolute erasure of any signs of labor involved in making it. Applied layer after layer, the painted surface is not supposed to reveal brushstrokes or other traces of the artist’s hand. What we thus see in most Western paintings, Bryson argues with verve, is a vision of the Gaze victoriously ruling over the the body and time. There is no way out of the regime of the Gaze that conditions painting as much as the subject’s perception. Admirably, Bryson attempts to apply Lacan’s mystified ideas of vision to images in order to come to a theory of painting that would both include and clarify the position of perception intimate as extimate ¦ 147

therein, without ever mentioning his name. Whereas Lacan offers a twofold route by which the subject can make room for itself to play with the screen, as Lacan calls it, Bryson comes up with a Foucault-informed counterterm: the Glance. Against the disembodied regime of the Gaze, Bryson posits the embodied viewing of what he calls the Glance. The Glance is his secret weapon in an attempt to fight the battle apparent in a global history of painting. While Italian Renaissance painting (and Western painting in general) demonstrates a victory of the Gaze over the Glance—the rhetoric of power struggle is clearly taken from Lacan’s Seminar XI—Chinese painting of the Ming period, for example, provides a visual counterargument for the rule of the Glance. The awareness of an embodied viewpoint brought about, Bryson asserts, by the particular technique of the Ming painters significantly differs from oil painting, as demonstrated in its traces of duration of the actual rendering of the image. Bryson takes the contrasting terms gaze and glance from Foucault, who, in The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1963), uses this pair of concepts to describe a rupture in the discourse of the medical sciences that took place around 1800. Foucault observes how in the classical era physicians scanned the surface of the sick body to create a portrait of the disease on the basis of analogy with symptoms vis-à-vis the classification tables.29 This medical gaze, whose structural basis is surface and continuity and whose main task is deciphering, was slowly replaced around 1800 by the clinical glance, which takes in-depth research of the whole individual’s body as its starting point. This clinical glance does not let itself be held back by taxonomy but wishes to touch or even open up the body, in order not only to recognize mere symptoms but also to observe in organs what causes disease. This clinical glance, a listening rather than describing mode of perception, goes beyond what it sees. The twodimensional gaze thus makes a place for a three-dimensional glance that pierces the body, opening it up to know it from the inside. The shift from a doctor’s stare to a physician’s glance brings about a new balance between what is seeable and what is sayable, between the visible and the articulable, between seeing and knowing. Without any further clarification regarding the origin of his terms, Bryson now merges the two very distinct definitions of the gaze, combining the power of the Lacanian gaze with the stubbornness, timelessness, and continuity of Foucault’s medical stare. Bryson presents the Glance as that which the Gaze represses: a form of painting that acknowledges the temporality and historicity of the body of the viewing subject. The marginalized Glance is thus a saboteur with regard to painting ruled by the 148 ¦ chapter  4

Gaze, but it is simultaneously that which the Gaze desires; it is all that the tradition seeks to suppress even as it takes on the force, in unexpected moments, to break out of the tradition. Bryson is not always very clear when trying to spell out the sophisticated dualism of the Gaze and the Glance. Are these two opposing conceptions an amalgam of techniques and practices according to which painters in different parts of the world produced their work, or a set of distinct viewing conditions, or both? In the case of the latter, it remains unclear whether painting can dictate a theory of vision (according to the Gaze or the Glance) or merely reflect it. When one reads Bryson closely, the Gaze and the Glance do not seem to be mere attitudes that a beholder can take on (an avenue that Mieke Bal has explored very successfully in her Reading “Rembrandt”: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition [1991]) but rather are viewing conditions created by painting, or by their pictorial techniques, which hence can only be accepted as is. The question arises which logic will claim victory in the end: the tradition of painting requiring a docile beholder or the paradigm in which a viewer conquers the regime of representation by bringing his or her body into the viewing process. Bryson’s text has had such an enormous influence in art history and visual theory that it is difficult to overestimate its impact on the current understanding of notions such as beholder, vision, and image. And yet the last word has not been said about the exact function of vision in the body’s relation to viewpoint or the beholder’s relation to the image. The confusion or frustration that Bryson’s text has created (and still creates) has been immensely productive and inspiring, evidenced by the vast amount of literature on the topic that has seen the light. His foundational text offers yet another way out of the intricate intertwining of image and gaze—not by aiming to unravel their hopelessly interlaced dualism but by refining terms on the basis of the notion of part object. Staying close to Bryson’s original wording—the Glance as that which the Gaze seeks to suppress— this subordination follows the structure of a Lacanian part-object or, more precisely, defines this structure of the function of the part-object as extimate. Such a structure can be further explained through the reversed dualism of eye pictures. For no matter how many diagrams or blueprints of underlying structures of composition and viewing patterns we draw up, the disembodied point of view has never been so aptly described as in eye portraits. If, as Bryson says, “the body itself is that which our painting always erases” (120), then the ultimate consequence of this confusing state has nowhere been made so clear, in painting, as in faceless eye portraits. intimate as extimate ¦ 149

Are these little portraits the ultimate consequence of Western painting and thus proof of the victory of the Gaze? Or are these marginalized items which can barely be called proper paintings, instances of an uncanny, piercing Glance, that part of vision and of representation that the Gaze has been so successful in repressing? Is the intimacy they evoke, the proximity they imply, the idea that vision is defined not by seeing but by being seen, that which the Gaze have been at pains to resist? Is it the intimate encounter between an art object and its exclusive beholder that breaks through the regime of the Gaze? These questions can be answered by further exploring the potential of the notion of extimacy as an analytical tool for painting’s relation to vision starting from that which eye portraits give us to see. I argue that only through the notion of the extimate can we fully understand the intimacy of vision that these tiny paintings evoke.

Extimate Vision Although mentioned only once or twice by Lacan in his Seminars to problematize the opposition between inside and outside in psychoanalysis, the notion of “extimacy” should be considered key in Lacanian psychoanalysis, Jacques-Alain Miller argues, in a paradoxical gesture so typical of his writings. The short essay Miller devotes to the topic aims at elevating this term to the level of a genuine Lacanian concept.30 Miller builds his case slowly, starting by explaining how Lacan coins the term extimité as an attempt to reformulate the Freudian uncanny. Freud explains the uncanny (Unheimlich) as that which is terrifying yet rooted in the familiar.31 It is what was once familiar, part of the subject’s feelings of home (Heimlich); later repressed, it is now exterior to the psychic apparatus (Unheimlich). The prefix un- Freud reads as indicative of repression. Through a survey of the etymology of the word, he famously reveals that in the course of its history, the term familiar gradually becomes more ambivalent—and eventually overlaps with its antonym, that which is secret or concealed. In fact, as Freud implies, the term Heimlich turns into its double as one and the same, and at the same time its extreme opposite, its antonym. In this doubling, sameness conceals difference and difference covers sameness. It is precisely this ambivalence that is most terrifying in the end, an estranging structure that, like a claw, holds the familiar firmly in its grip.32 Whereas in Freud’s discussion of Heimlich and Unheimlich he intends to describe a feeling or experience, Lacan is more interested in the exact nature of the ambivalent relationship between the terms. Focusing on the topology of foreign and familiar, interior and exterior, he invents the term 150 ¦ chapter  4

extimacy to designate the relation between the quality of exteriority that somehow remains apparent in the ways that the subject experiences the intimate as his or her utmost interior, splicing together the words intimacy and exterior. Miller compares St. Augustine’s description of God as interior intimo meo, “more interior than my innermost being,” with what Lacan says about the Other: “this other to whom I am more attached than to my self, since, at the heart of my assent to my identity to myself, it is he who stirs me.”33 Or, as Lacan said elsewhere: the Other is “something strange to me, although it is at the heart of me.”34 As such, the extimate is the unsettling awareness that what the subject may experience as his or her innermost self is, in fact, other from itself—as Miller says “a foreign body, a parasite.” Lacan’s neologism attempts to establish a correlation between the intimate and the hidden, or the psychical interior and exterior, but also between subject and object, or rather, between the subject and that part of a (familiar) object that has become repressed. As we have seen, this repression is essential for the constitution of the self as a way of separating ourselves from that which we are not. The intimate is thus the establishment of the innermost self by the rejection of certain objects as foreign or parasitical to the self. It is through rejection or negation, paradoxically, that these objects remain related in the sense that they remain attached to the subject’s interior. I have discussed examples of such rejected objects as the Freudian part-objects of the breast, the phallus, and feces, along with Lacan’s additional objects, the voice and the gaze. In Read My Desire, writing about the coincidence between the eighteenth-century imperative to breast-feed and literature about vampires and blood-sucking, Copjec states that part-objects, while rejected in order to constitute the individual as subject, remain nonetheless internal to the subject: “These Freudian objects are, then, not only rejected from but also internal to the subject. In brief, they are extimate, which means they are in us that which is not us.”35 Copjec further explains how we may experience the extimate part-object as a lost part of ourselves as long as we remain far removed from it. The lost part can thus be considered as what prevents us from being whole. However, when the distance to the part-object has been reduced, it no longer appears to us as a part of ourselves but as something quite like ourselves, a double, which almost looks like another whole, were it not for this double being endowed with the object that we rejected to become a subject. At this moment, uncanny feelings would come over us, a creepy presence of something too much like us that we should separate ourselves from, very much as Freud describes the encounter with his mirror image in the train.36 What we experience if we encounter a site of intimate as extimate ¦ 151

uncanniness is how the part-object that has been separated from us is still very much a part of us. Copjec’s illuminating explanation may help us get closer to answering the question of the precise relationship between gaze and painting. Bryson did not separate the various sides of vision and painting but examined them as elements of one big machinery of image-making, and as a consequence, he saw the terms as fundamentally entangled, as a knotting of parts that are separate yet cannot be detached from one another. With the term extimate we now have a tool in hand to further illuminate this relation between the gaze of the subject, the image of the object, the gaze as coming from the object, and the subject as image when we consider these relationships as comparable to or even modeled after part-objects. Indeed, if we recall Josephine’s hair bracelet as a site where these interactions between gaze and image, subject and object, merge, we can imagine Auguste Amalia’s gaze, exterior as it may be, as conditioning the very core of Josephine’s intimate being. The portrait of her mother’s gaze is like a lost part of herself that, as long as Josephine manages to keep it at a safe distance, will provide her with an image of herself, a projection of herself under her mother’s eye which will always have been constituted around a lack. It is through this lack that Josephine conditions herself as a subject. The image of her mother’s gaze is the link between Josephine’s most intimate sense of self and the exterior world. Rejected and internal at the same time, the extimate link between gaze and self which generates a sense of loss is productive, and even nourishing, to borrow from Stokes. The merging of image and gaze, subject and object, and the consequences for the viewing subject, so clearly mapped out by the eye portrait, will provide us with a useful insight regarding figurative painting in general. In light of the work of Gérard Wajcman, the merging we see in the “extimate” space designed by the eye miniature is in fact a foundation for a psychoanalytical aesthetics.

Taming the Gaze Miller’s proposal to see the extimate as a concept fundamental to Lacan’s psychoanalysis has been taken to heart by Wajcman. His monumental Fenêtres: Chroniques de regard et de l’intime (2004) argues that the extimate, by designating a knotting of disjointed territories of private and public, subject and object, self and other, configures our universe.37 Wajcman insists that what is extimate about this knotting is that these territories join and rejoin without merging. Indeed, a subject is also partly an object, the 152 ¦ chapter  4

outside also approaches the inside without ever fusing with it as such. Ultimately, the consequences of this knotting of seemingly exclusive areas is the unsettling awareness that we have no other interiority than the world itself. Wajcman intends to demonstrate that perspectival painting serves as the structure of this “shredded,” extimate configuration of our universe. Crucial to his understanding of vision is a statement made by psychoanalyst and writer Yves Depelsenaire: “We are fundamentally gazed upon beings; in the spectacle of the world, there is always an Other who in some way is looking at us.”38 Wajcman ponders at length the consequences of the birth of the painting-as-window (in French tableau) in the fifteenth century for us as gazed-upon beings.39 He observes a parallel between his own hypothesis that the invention of the tableau generated the spectator in the modern sense of the word and George Duby’s claim that around 1300 medieval eyes turned toward the domestic. Representations of that period indeed confirm a sudden interest in intimate scenes, and accordingly, as evinced by the Dictionnaire historique de la langue francaise, the word intimate starts to appear in the fourteenth century in French. Wajcman wonders in what way Alberti’s window-painting has become a means of creating for the viewer an intimacy that goes beyond mere visual access to painted domestic scenes to become an intimacy with the self. Where there is a desire to see, there is also a prohibition that designates the sphere of the private as inaccessible to others, separated from the realm of the public.40 Though privacy can be defined in terms of the hidden that can be protected, even by exercising one’s (political) rights over it, intimacy falls outside the operation of protection. It should not be understood merely as a superlative of the private, a super-exclusive or restrictive realm. Rather, Wajcman defines the notion of the intimate entirely according to the gaze, as that part of the private that is desirable to see but that, precisely because it is desirable, is not seen. Intimacy is not what is concealed from the public realm but what is secret: not to the public but to the subject as such. Whereas it is generally claimed that perspective created painting as a window through which we as viewers see the world, in fact, Wajcman reasons, the eye does not look out of the picture frame at all. On the contrary, while “in” the painting, the looking subject is shielded from being seen. Our desire to look at paintings is triggered not only by the representation’s beauty or illusion of reality but also by the opportunity it gives us to subtract ourselves from the visual field. Opposite a perspectival painting, we intimate as extimate ¦ 153

seek projection from the Gaze by looking out a window without the threat of being seen.41 For Wajcman, Alberti’s tableau-window signals the birth of the spectator, the subject who sees without being seen and without being called to see.42 Whereas Albertian painting is said to have opened a window onto the world, Wajcman claims that it has effectively opened a window onto the subject by shutting out the world. Along with the births of the tableau-painting and the spectator in front of it comes the birth of indiscretion, Wajcman explains, in the shape of the (key)hole through which a greedy eye can peep. He distinguishes between a public gaze desiring to see intimate scenes and a voyeuristic gaze that gradually develops out of it over the course of Renaissance painting. This voyeuristic gaze is not so much eager to see secrets as to see in secret: that is, it actually enters the secret, “ruffling” this intimacy, so to speak.43 Wajcman distinguishes between the subsequent directions of the gaze: first toward the window, looking into domestic life, and second, from the window out into the world. The birth of the tableau diverts these orientations, but it also brings about a more fundamental change, from gazing on what one does not see, namely the secret, to the gaze one does not see. “The window of Alberti’s tableau makes the gaze itself enter into the invisible of the intimate,” he writes.44 In fact, what Albertian painting has accomplished is precisely the creation of an intimate act of looking through a window toward the point of view that does not return the gaze, toward a gaze that does not see. In the context of Wajcman’s ideas, eye portraits present a slightly paradoxical aspect. Leaving aside whether hybrid eye portraits can be considered very small yet genuine paintings, they create an intimacy with the beholder by entering the realm of the secret; yet this intimacy is achieved precisely because the painted gaze is returned. Instead of promising the comfort of Albertian painting that Wajcman presupposes, eye portraits confront their viewers by creating the illusion that the viewer is being watched. However, and here I slightly depart from Wajcman, the illusion of being watched by an exclusive viewer does not violate the intimacy that has been achieved, as the portrait of the eye is ultimately a way of channeling an inward gaze upon the self, which, as Wajcman claims for Albertian painting, keeps the Gaze with a capital G at bay. In the example that I will discuss, we will see that, following Wajcman’s ideas and using Bryson’s text as our base, we can explain in more detail why the intertwining of the Gaze and painting is unfathomable—a secret—all the while being the condition for vision.

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A Painted Point of View Let’s look at the unorthodox eye miniature shown in plate 20. Unique in its kind, it reveals a rather ambitious composition. Apparently, the anonymous artist had great plans for this small piece of ivory. Mounted on a brooch surrounded by clouds, a dark brown eye emerges from behind a blue silk curtain drawn back by a small cupid. A reference to Pliny’s famous anecdote of the rivalry between Zeuxis and Parhassios, the curtain draws upon a long tradition in the history of painting as a typically Baroque motif, indicative of deceptive and theatrical imagery. In miniature, the curtain has lost nothing of its iconographic significance. However tiny, the ivory support sustains a slight notion of narrative or at least temporality, incorporated in the gesturing cupid, who announces the scene to us by drawing back the drapery with one hand while pointing to the eye with the other. While this brooch must have been a lover’s gift, the image is not wholly unthreatening. The eye peers out like a sun from behind the dark clouds that frame it, unfolding a story of reconciliation rather than eternal love. The subject matter of this miniature is not a portrait of the gaze but rather its revelation. Peeping simultaneously from behind the curtain and the clouds, this eye stages an unexpected surprise. Indeed, if this artist intended to depict a gaze that strikes the beholder as if by one of Cupid’s arrows, he succeeded. In addition to its multiple meanings of revelation and deceit, the curtain as trope evokes Alberti’s window metaphor, further suggesting that the artist aspired to create a full-fledged “tableau” in miniature. We have to admit that this painting offers us a view, but in quite a different way than Alberti imagined it. Obviously, essential to Alberti’s method of rendering pictorial space is the premise that the viewing eye must remain outside the representation as such, its fixed position in front of the image outlined by the perspective’s configuration. What consequences ought we to draw from this tableau-in-miniature, offering us a “view” from within the space of representation as its subject? Viewpoints depicted in paintings as their sole subject matter are unprecedented in the history of art. However, there are instances whereby the vanishing point fuses with the point of view, as in the case of trompe l’oeil easel paintings.45 This fusion cannot be seen but remains perceptible to the extent that the eye of the beholder is deceived. According to Wolfgang Kemp, a similar fusion occurs in Jacques-Louis David’s Oath in the Tennis Court (1791, fig. 48).46 Kemp discusses the art-historical and theoretical potential of a vanishing point turned into a point of view. In the intimate as extimate ¦ 155

figure 48.  Jacques-Louis David, Oath in the Tennis Court, 1791. Pencil and wash on paper. Musée National du Château, Versailles.

center of David’s composition, which depicts the defiant pledge made by the deputies of the Third Estate (or National Assembly) to draw up a new constitution, stands the figure of Bailly, who as president of the Third Estate chaired the assembly. Kemp notes that the vanishing point of David’s composition is located precisely between the eyes of Bailly, who is elevated above the rest of the attendees. The all-encompassing underlying perspectival configuration is combined with one man’s address, unifying a speech act of a whole congregation. Such a fusion of point of view and vanishing point is unprecedented in larger pictures in the history of art, Kemp claims, and he ponders its significance at length (169–70). Comparing Bailly’s depiction with various instances of emblematic looking and single-eye symbolism as discussed in chapter 2, we see that Kemp fails to address the issue of monocular versus binocular vision. However, he offers a rather fascinating reading of the Masonic eye on the American dollar bill that, in a triangular frame, tops a pyramid (178). Preconditioned, it seems, by David’s underlying perspectival configuration, Kemp sees in the pyramid a strong resemblance to the diagram of visual representation consisting of two so-called visual cones mirroring each other. At their intersection is the painting, determined by the viewpoint on one side, where the beholder is supposed to stand, and the vanishing point

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on the other, which lies deep in the painting. As Bailly’s eyes are placed at the intersection of the picture’s diagonals, they mark the peak of a triangle. Just as the eye on the dollar bill forms the summit and closure of the pyramid, Bailly’s eyes crown the four triangles of representation as an appropriate supreme being. I would like to suggest that in eye portraits, too, we see a collapse of view and vanishing points, yet in a different way than Kemp describes, and with far more radical consequences than in David’s Oath. This collapse does not at all compromise traditional representation but, on the contrary, seems to remodel it. Eye portraits, as showing a viewpoint, fundamentally depart from the traditional models of representation and linear perspective yet remain embedded in their regimes. Reflected in this pictorial category is neither a view of the world nor a window to the soul, but an instance of being seen by the picture, from a point within it. Indeed, in the context of the Albertian rendering of images, we may not go too far if we say that eye portraits have reduced painting to a point of view. Taking into account Wajcman’s definition of painting as an unthreatening realm for our gaze, we may wonder whether these tiny watercolors, by looking back at us, should still be considered paintings in the Albertian sense of the word. What, in these minuscule pictures, has remained of painting as such? If we assume that eye portraits give us something to see that was never “in” Albertian painting to begin with, what part of a history of vision are they able to tell us by showing us what has fallen outside of the pictorial tradition while being essential to it? What consequences should we draw from this depiction? If the hidden is the condition of the subject, as Wajcman states, eye miniatures create an intimate space where the gaze of solitude rules, joining beholder and beheld as if in a knot. Within this space, a viewer may look the way she or he breathes, taking in a private vision as if inhaling, and turn into a fully embodied viewer, whose body is not denied by this minipainting but is celebrated for being seen, in a seeing resulting from a clash of gazes. This moment of being alone with oneself is essentially an awareness of being in the world, that is, a sense that the intimate is outside the self but makes itself apparent via the inward look. “The Kantian imperative of thinking by one’s self demands the closed curtain,” Wajcman writes. “If I am seen, do I think?” (67). In this light, the curtain in the eye miniature may obtain a further layer of meaning. In addition to the element of surprise and revelation, it implies a previous intense moment of privacy, in which the beholder was able to think because she or he was not seen. In Being and Nothingness Sartre writes: “Of course what most often manifests a intimate as extimate ¦ 157

look is the convergence of two ocular globes in my direction. But the look will be given just as well on occasion when there is a rustling of branches, or the sound of a footstep followed by silence, or the slight opening of a shutter, or a light movement of a curtain” (257). Whereas for Sartre the windows of a house, the shutter, or the curtain as representations of the eye or supports of the look mean a potential threat to his viewer/voyeur, Wajcman is more in line with Gaston Bachelard when he focuses on the place behind a curtain to hide, not to see.47 Bryson has argued that his notion of the Gaze that has ruled painting has systematically disavowed the viewer’s body, and as a consequence has successfully suppressed the Glance. In his perspective, the regime may occasionally be broken into but can ultimately be undermined only through complete subversion, when the Glance conquers the Gaze. I wonder how Wajcman’s ideas on intimacy, brought out by being in front of a painting, protected from the Lacanian Gaze, might add to Bryson’s dualism. Is there perhaps something that needs to be suppressed in painting for it to become a frozen moment, this window onto the Founding Perception? If we follow Wajcman here, the window is not approached from the outside, as for instance with Sartre’s staring windows with half-open shutters and slightly waving curtains which are potential threats as supports for the gaze. Wajcman’s window is seen from the inside of a room, and for him the “view” that painting offers to the subject is one that turns itself inward, the window’s imaginary shutters shielding us from the Gaze. In contrast to the backdrop of visibility dissolving our contours, as Lacan describes it, it is in front of painting that our outline as subjects emerges, not to the world but to us. In this respect, Wajcman’s theory of intimacy as founded on painting as a shield runs along similar lines as Bachelard’s understanding that intimacy is found in places that can be opened up. Just like Bachelard’s wardrobe that, once opened up, cancels out the exterior world, Wajcman’s shutter-painting opens up by closing out the world. For both thinkers, the logic of inside and outside operates according to repression: for opening, something first needs to close, and by closing, something will opens up. What gets opened up, however, remains fully dependent on that what closes. The cancellation of the exterior that Bachelard mentions can thus be better understood through Wajcman’s ideas of the extimate: what is pushed away as outside, foreign, and exterior is, ultimately, the essence of the opening up of the inside. If intimacy is defined as that which is subtracted from the gaze, as Wajcman indeed suggests, we should realize that it is still conditioned according to the gaze. Would it be possible to state that the suppressed Glance has been a prerequisite of painting? I suggest 158 ¦ chapter  4

we could, if we refine the terms of the equation on the basis of what eye portraits have offered us: a painted point of view. For something has indeed stayed outside of painting, according to both Bryson’s and Wajcman’s Gaze, something that has been not merely outside of Albertian painting but has been suppressed by it, all the while remaining essential to its visibility, and that is the point of view. Indeed, the condition of Albertian painting was a suppression of point of view, which was supposed to be pushed outside of painting by the fictional vanishing point that was embraced by it. Loosely translating the notion of the extimate to the visual arts, we could say therefore that in the realm of painting, eye portraits are extimate in the sense of appendages that painting has separated itself from in order to become a tableau. As a viewpoint that, in contrast to the perspectival point in painting, does look and also somehow channels the vision of others as well as that of the beholder, the eye miniature is a foreign body, like a parasite (as Miller so blatantly named the part-object) in the history of painting. Indeed, on a more theoretical level, the eye miniature illuminates not just the notion of the part-object but its function: it provides a spectral image of that which has been “cut off ” from its main panel, effectively leaving a trace, a mark, in the shape of a point, or, rather, a “hole,” where the invisible and blind object-gaze in the field of vision resides. Cut off yet still attached to painting as the very center around which the composition revolves, the point of view has wandered through time only to become manifest as a “returning” of the gaze in eye miniatures (other examples include trompe l’oeil paintings and landscapes). Against the backdrop of the history of Western European painting, eye portraits can be understood as extimate; they are the extimacy of painting as that which is repressed and foreign to painting, all the while being at the heart of it. As Wajcman explains, the extimate is not a merging but a kind of knotting that ultimately stands at the basis of our understanding of intimacy, which was born when perspectival painting started to allow the subject to be absorbed in its pictorial space as a way of facing itself. Intimate vision is conditioned along the lines of the extimate, as an encounter, or rather, a transmission, between the subject and the object of the gaze. As eye portraits demonstrate as well, this transmission does not result from merging. The encounter is in fact the junction of a contingent exterior with the most intimate interior.48 Indeed, somehow in the encounter in which the miniature looks back with its sole eye, the beholder gets absorbed as much in that vision as in himself or herself. It is this history of vision that eye pictures are able to tell us, and that we have been able to unravel on the basis of what they show us. intimate as extimate ¦ 159

The birth of the intimate coincides with the appearance of indiscretion, Wajcman argues. As we have seen in my discussion of wax portraits, it is the return of the gaze, from a point of view that is not supposed to be “in” the image, that is excessive and, as a consequence, indiscreet. As Copjec explained, as long as we keep this gaze-as-part-object at a healthy distance, we perceive it as nonthreatening, as that which we seek to approach and wish to find as a (lost) part of ourselves (as we have seen in eye portraits). As such it drives us forth; it is the cause of our desire to always see more. However, when the gaze-as-part-object comes too close, it will take the form not of a part-object but of our double (as we have seen with the gaze of the wax portraits). This gaze is excessive, indiscreet, creeping upon us as a threat, so that the feeling of the uncanny comes over us. Painting, or rather portraiture, can assist us in negotiating this distance, helping us understand it. Man is a half-open being, Bachelard has said. Unfortunately, in exploring what half-open means in spatial terms, he refrains from problematizing the nature and logic of the relation of inside to outside. In addition to space, vision has an essential role in our understanding of the dialectics of inside and outside. As Walter Benjamin put it: “In the eyes we see people to the lees.”49 It is through the slit of the eyelids that the gaze escapes in order to establish a pathway between the most intimate part of the self and the exterior of the world.

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5 the face becoming eye Portraiture’s Minimum

If I could change the nature of my being and become a living eye, I would gladly make that exchange. —jean-jacques rousseau 1

What Is Left of Portraiture? Among the eye miniatures in the collection of the Musée Carnavalet in Paris is a quite exquisitely rendered golden-brown left eye accompanied by small ringlets of light chestnut hair speckled with gray (plate 21). It is mounted in a gold frame surrounded with brilliants. The inscription on its reverse side reads, in boldface letters, lord byron. Are we looking at a depiction of the poet’s famously mesmerizing gaze?2 Presumably it should not be too difficult to verify the authenticity of the Carnavalet eye portrait. Byron, quite the celebrity, was portrayed

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countless times during his life. A wide range of accounts written by contemporaries tell in great detail of his extravagant appearance, eccentric behavior, and pale, intriguing face. Though it should be easy to see whether these verbal or visual accounts correspond to the golden-brown iris in the miniature, the opposite is the case. Remarkably, the surviving reports do not agree about the color of Byron’s eyes, or, for that matter, his appearance as a whole. His eyes have been variously described as gray, (light) blue, brown, azure, even greenish.3 When we turn to oil portraits, we are equally disappointed. In what is probably his best-known portrait, painted by Thomas Phillips in 1813–14 (plate 22) and showing him in Albanian costume, his curved lips adorned by a thin mustache, we see his eyes directed toward the left.4 They are clearly a light blue color. Confusingly, in contrast, in Richard Westall’s celebrated painting (1813, plate 23) depicting the poet musing in profile while resting his head on his hand, a conspicuous cameo at his collar, the one eye visible from the side is light brown.5 How can we know for sure which portraitist has been true to the color of the poet’s eyes? While the color of Byron’s eyes has been perceived differently by different people, his two eyes were said to differ from each other as well. Sir Thomas Lawrence noted that Byron’s eyes were very bright but “dissimilar,” a fact that is confirmed by many observers including the poet’s halfsister Augusta Leigh, who once wrote him that due to some illness “your small eye look[s] now so much smaller.”6 As an old school friend of Byron remarks, the difference in size was comparable to that between a sixpence and a one-shilling piece.7 In addition, much was said about the placement of the eyes. Their being set too close to the nose caused Lady Stanhope to remark that “he had a great deal of vice in his looks.”8 Thus, as uneven as his eyes themselves—a fact that may have led Byron to have himself portrayed mostly in profile or in three-quarters view—are the accounts of his appearance. What the self-possessed oil portraits by Phillips and Westall and various miniatures by George Sanders and James Holmes do not immediately show is how, by comparison, Byron’s “portrait” is in fact governed by contradiction and distortion. His most notable deformity, the clubfoot that made him slightly lame, was apparently of secondary interest to most of those fascinated by him. Even his body weight seemed to have fluctuated considerably, transforming his figure from very thin to quite fat in a matter of months.9 Moreover, many of the British who encountered him on the Continent after his self-imposed exile from England in 1815 were surprised to find him grown prematurely old and gray, looking forty when he had not yet reached thirty in 1818.10 162 ¦ chapter  5

Should we lean toward dismissing the eye picture in the Musée Carnavalet as an authentic portrait on the basis of such disparate accounts, immediate questions arise: on what grounds may we do so, and which or whose Byron are we actually talking about? Apparently the man’s various appearances somehow resisted recording or representation. Already in 1812, Lady Caroline Lamb wrote to Lord Byron: “If any painter could paint me that face as it is, I would give anything I possess on earth—no one has yet given the countenance and complexion as it is.”11 In Lamb’s opinion no painter was capable of painting Byron’s extraordinary face as it truly was, and as it turns out history has proved her quite right. The rich literature about Byron’s portraits does not assist in solving this problem; indeed, attempts to authenticate this eye as Byron’s ultimately reveal the essentially fraudulent quality of portraiture as such. In this chapter, the issues of authentication and identification that Bryon’s alleged eye picture evokes will be used for examining the implications of eye portraits for the understanding of portraiture as a whole. If, as Fumerton has said, the life-size oil portrait is to the miniature what the statesman or monarch is to a family member, what would the miniature of a family member be to a picture of a poet’s eye that, despite its inscription, remains unidentifiable, at least to anyone outside of his intimate circle? To what extent can an eye picture be considered a genuine portrait, and in what way does it fall outside the genre to which it has been assigned? Should we define eye pictures as a by-product of portraiture’s rich history, a once fashionable leftover that is now slightly embarrassing in light of the magnificent age of portraiture of the second half of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries? As a whim of the already marginalized subcategory of miniature art, eye pictures offer little to remind us of that celebrated tradition. Indeed, we may wonder what is left here of painting as such. We see painting brought to its most minuscule scale, at the point of its almost vanishing, and at this point it is looking back at us. Can we thus reason that in Byron’s eye we see a mere fragment, a glimpse of his extraordinary appearance, no matter how fraudulent or inconsistent its rendering has been? Or does this ocular picture in fact encapsulate the very essence of his unreliable look, in the multiple sense of the word? Aside from the obvious art-historical problems of authentication, Byron’s alleged eye picture thus raises theoretical issues regarding the definition of portraiture as a genre, as well as more philosophical questions as to the constitution of a subject’s image. I would like to address these issues in the context of Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay “The Look of the Portrait” (2000). In this essay, the philosopher the face becoming eye ¦ 163

argues that portraiture is organized around a figure, who in its turn is organized around a gaze, or rather, the departure of the gaze. What we see in portraiture, Nancy claims, is how the gaze escapes portraiture while lying at the heart of it. Taking Byron’s eye as a starting point and building on the previous chapter, I will argue that eye portraits, despite scholarly neglect and their only modest role in history, do not occupy a position at the margins of portraiture but lie at its heart. Further complicating the notion of the withdrawal of the gaze as we have discussed in chapter 3, eye portraits are in fact capturing the gaze that has departed from the sitter’s eye. If Nancy is right to assert that a portrait in fact looks with its entire painterly being, the eye portrait truly embodies the idea of being a living eye. If, for a moment, we consider eye portraits to be the extimate of painting, it should follow that the intimacy they evoke does not lie “in” the tiny pictures but is somehow drawn in from outside their frame. If eye portraits are capable of subverting the subject-object relation at all, it is in revealing this particular relation between the intimate and exterior.

The Eye of the Rattlesnake: The Byronic Gaze Let’s first return to the indeterminable eye of Byron. Despite the conflicting remarks about the color of the poet’s eyes, virtually all accounts are in complete agreement about their being extraordinarily expressive and bright.12 Numerous documents written by people who knew the poet, whether closely or merely by sight, tell a similar story of the often extravagantly dressed gentlemanlike figure with a sensuous mouth and, most notably, an astonishingly captivating gaze. His eyes looked as if fires were burning in them, according to one report, or, as Coleridge poetically phrased it, they appeared as portals to the sun.13 Indeed, if we decide to follow Coleridge down a lyrical route, we may even see the “golden light” represented in the light-brown hue of the iris in the Carnavalet trinket. The “light” or “brightness” so typical of Byron’s gaze no doubt was responsible for its notoriously mesmerizing or, as Coleridge said, bewitching effect. Could Byron’s “portrait,” no matter how distorted and unbalanced the various accounts may be, be summed up in an eye picture that presumably reflected Coleridge’s lyrical observations? In that case, the golden light of the poet’s eyes (or rather, the brownish hue of the iris) should provide enough of him to sustain his portrait. To Coleridge, Byron’s eye was not a mere receiver but a transmitter of a golden light which sent the gaze plunging into the world to cast its spell and bewitch its beholder. 164 ¦ chapter  5

But it was not mere golden light that radiated from his eyes. If we may believe Lady Caroline Lamb’s dramatized account of her love affair with the poet in her scandalous novel Glenarvon (1816), the power of Byron’s looks became manifest most vividly when his “lethal” gaze met with his admirer’s, as if to clash with it. She compares the gaze of her hero, Lord Glenarvon (modeled after Byron), to that of a rattlesnake that, “once fixed upon its victim, overpowers it with terror and alarm [so that it is] unable to fly from his fascination.”14 In a word, Byron’s gaze was bewildering. In her novel, Lamb meticulously dissects this bewildering gaze by carefully anatomizing its step-by-step operation upon her. She describes the protagonist Calantha before she meets her beloved as visually untouched, her field of vision being like a virgin territory in which all objects have equal import as they appear before her merely to charm her (82). When Glenarvon enters her life, this pastoral field of vision is instantly replaced by a perceptual battlefield where looks can wound, eyes can kill, gazes acquire a murderous power, and shields of protection are called for but not found. The loss of her optical innocence comes at a great price. Like a bird charmed by a rattlesnake, she feels herself utterly exposed in this optical power’s line of fire. Lamb describes in great detail how the rattlesnake look functions as a kind of a stage light falling always upon her, illuminating her within the network of social seeing. This network is as much a hostile force as an erogenous zone, one in which a lover’s gaze can be a form of bondage, as well as a kind of spotlight exposing her. From the moment Glenarvon lays eyes on her, she suddenly feels highly vulnerable to other people’s stares as well, as if she had become more than visible. Every private exchange between their gazes is overshadowed by society’s eye of surveillance, which observers “this extreme and sudden intimacy” that she experiences (154). In his essay “At First Sight” Mladen Dolar explores the paradox of love as a way to better understand Lacan’s term extimacy. Defining extimacy as the junction of a contingent exterior with the most intimate interior, Dolar looks at the clash of gazes between lovers as an instance of such junction. He observes that in nineteenth-century literature falling in love is described as a contradiction in the sense that one never really chooses one’s lover; rather, one recognizes him or her as a choice that has already been made. The clash of gazes marking this moment of recognition is what Dolar characterizes as a moment of “seeing” rather than looking, a moment that seems to be “filled” with the gaze.15 Whether or not love is returned (one can also fall in love with a portrait, Dolar insists), the significant instance is when the gaze is returned (by the loved the face becoming eye ¦ 165

one, by a portrait), causing the subject to awaken into a life that suddenly makes sense. The narrative trope of such meeting, Dolar explains, continues with the characters realizing that this clash is something they had been waiting for all their lives. The first time lovers’ eyes meet is always already a recognition of the love one has been waiting for, and therefore it is essentially a repetition. The prehistory of this moment is written only retroactively, as a reversed narrative in which the characters recognize that which they seem to have known all their lives. Once returned, the gaze fills a lack in a previously senseless life. The clash indicates a jump from “not yet” to an “always already,” creating a past that was never present to begin with. Certainly, for Calantha the clash between her gaze and Glenarvon’s marks a most significant moment in her life. She recognizes her object choice in him and awakens into a life that suddenly starts to makes sense— she starts “seeing,” to use Dolar’s phrase. The clue to this kind of love is the narcissism evoked by the jubilant feeling of becoming, under the gaze of the beloved, what one recognizes one always had been. However, as Dolar explains, the returning gaze also points to the extremely fine line between jubilation and shattering anxiety. The gaze and recognition can easily dissociate, threatening to disintegrate reality. Almost a century before Freud started to articulate his concept of the Unheimlich resulting from this dislocation of recognition and the gaze (as discussed in the previous chapter), Lamb had recorded in meticulous detail how Calantha’s reality starts to disintegrate under Glenarvon’s gaze. For Calantha, there is no escape from his gaze, no protection from it. The disintegration of her formerly innocent world continues when her lover’s entangling optical tentacles materialize into actual shackles: he demands that she wear only jewels given by him. Thus chaining her with jewels and parading her as if on a leash before the gazes of onlooking society, he makes her even more exposed to the perception of the people around them—and it is precisely under the gaze of the others that their relation is most intense. Yet it is so at the expense of her subjecthood.16 Not only doomed to fail because of social restrictions, this love affair is fueled precisely by these limitations.17 Bondage via his gaze, in front of the stares of others, is essential to the lovers’ intimate relationship; that is, their intimacy can be played out only in front of an audience of startled onlookers. This regime of a gaze as bondage is far removed from the gazing games played in the society circles gathered around the Prince of Wales and Mrs. Fitzherbert, which I described in chapter 2. Indeed, Glenarvon’s wish to expose his jewel-chained lover has been drained of even the slightest hint of 166 ¦ chapter  5

lightness or playfulness. It seems that what in the late eighteenth century begun as a frivolous gazing game has become a deadly serious path toward self-destruction in Romanticism. The gaze, first tamed and glorified, has slowly become dislocated from recognition—to finally be lost in Unheimlichkeit, an unfamiliarity without bounds, only to be recognized as such by Freud later on. If we look at the innocent-looking eye portrait in the Musée Carnavalet, we may wonder whether this tiny picture reflects the rattlesnake gaze so insightfully analyzed by Lamb. In the context of the notion of recognition described by Dolar and Lamb, despite its frame of brilliants bracketing off the look from the world, the small, faceless image nonetheless looks as if it looks with its entire being. If this is the all-encompassing look that can fill a room, as Dolar would have it, the monumentality of its vision obviously does not derive from its scale but from the space it allows to shrink around itself, and the way it sets itself outside time, as a continuing presence, an “always already” yet without a clear past, not falling within chronological time but appearing as a life within a life, as Stewart says. Contemplating this faceless image that seems to look with its entire being, can we still understand it as a portrait? Whether we agree with the early modern definition of a portrait as a faithful rendering or a likeness, as Alberti and Dürer famously described its aims, or with the modern understanding of a framed drawing or painting of a face or head and shoulders, eye portraits fulfill the requirements of neither conception.18 André Félibien defines “to portray” in general terms as to draw a resemblance of something rather than someone, which may safely include portraits of gazes, but as we will see with Bryon’s eye picture, it may be hard to pinpoint what exactly it resembles.19 Moreover, Byron’s eye, and the problems of authentication it evokes, is diametrically opposed to the deictic qualities Louis Marin sees as defining the portrait of the king that invites his subjects to confirm that this is indeed the king’s glorious body.20 If we, despite the inadequacy of these definitions, still consider eye miniatures portraits, we have to admit that the question whether this is an image recalling Byron’s mesmerizing gaze will turn out to be a threat to the authenticity of his portraits. There is, however, one object that can lead us out of the impasse: a second surviving eye miniature of Byron. In 1807, when Byron was nineteen, Elizabeth Pigot (1782–1866) painted a portrait of his right eye (plate 24). This eye picture was originally contained in a circular double-sided locket with a hinged gilt-metal mount, along with a lock of chestnut-colored hair and a slip of paper with Byron’s the face becoming eye ¦ 167

full name and the date 26th April 1807 written on it in the artist’s hand.21 In her exhaustive survey of Byronic portraits, Annette Peach states that the setting and provenance of this item confirm its status as an authentic portrait of Byron’s right eye. During the years 1806–9 Elizabeth Pigot and Byron were neighbors and must have had much contact during the young Cambridge reader’s vacations at Burgage Manor, his mother’s residence in Southwell, Nottinghamshire. Peach claims that Pigot’s eye was painted ad vivum, and that, though clumsily rendered, the image is a closely observed record of an eye whose vaguely brown-grayish color is speckled with baby blue, quite different from the warm golden brown in the Carnavalet picture.22 While discussing Pigot’s previously unreproduced eye picture in detail, Peach makes no mention of the Carnavalet picture (not even in her list of purported pictures).23 Indeed no reference to the Paris eye picture exists in the rather extensive literature on Byronic portraits and other paraphernalia relating to him. If, on the grounds of the physical facts about Byron as a person, we regard the Carnavalet eye picture as an unfaithful representation of its sitter, it follows that we should also start doubting the veracity of Byron’s portraits by artists such as Westall and Phillips. Confusing, too, is the Carnavalet picture’s rather stunningly realistic depiction of a lifelike eye, especially when compared to Pigot’s supposedly accurate yet amateurishly rendered image. Rather than getting bogged down in issues of verisimilitude at this point, I suggest that the consternation evoked by Byron’s pictures illustrates, in fact, the dissociation of the gaze from recognition. If the gaze, as we have seen in previous chapters, is that which is vanishing at the moment it looks back at us, that which withdraws from the image, if it is that which is indiscreet, Unheimlich, and (therefore) suppressed in our visual field, if it is that which we cannot recognize in our own mirror image, we may wonder whether it can it be portrayed in portraiture at all. The gaze does not have a specular image, and as Byron’s eye portraits reveal, it seems to fiercely resist proper portrayal in terms of resemblance. Therefore, would we not better say that it can only be circumscribed in paint but never fully copied, that it can be approximated but never fully represented? Can the gaze be depicted only by means of its place of origin, its support, its visual organ (as Sartre would have it), or as the living gaze springing from that organ? Nancy would argue as much when he states that what we see in portraits is precisely the escape of the gaze, its departure from the eyes. As Nancy explains, the departure of the sitter’s gaze results in something essential for the portrait’s relation to itself, namely intimacy.

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The Look of the Portrait In his four-part essay “The Look of the Portrait,” Nancy discusses portraiture as the site par excellence to encompass in visual terms the ontology of the subject. Portraiture is essentially the act of painting the “absolute” subject, Nancy explains, not only because it is the creation of an image of a person by another person for another person but also because it is a circumscription of a subject insofar as it is detached from all exteriority.24 In most cases, portraits are autonomous in that they present a subject without action or expression. All action occurring in such images is found in the act of painting the subject as such. Following Jean-Marie Pontévia’s definition of a portrait as a painting that organizes itself around a figure, Nancy states that this figure is not an object in painting but is rather the true subject of painting. Therefore, in portraiture we do not see a revelation of a “me” but the exposition of the subject, in the term’s double meaning as simultaneously exposing and dislocating (ex-posing) it. The subject is dislocated, as it has been detached from its environment; its whole identity is contained within the frame. Nothing lies “behind” the image, no interiority or individuality gets represented or expressed “in” the painting. On the contrary, the detachment of the sitter from his or her environment is further reinforced by the typical lack of pictorial depth. Many examples of early modern autonomous portraits show figures posing in front of an indefinite dark background or a curtain. If such portraits are truly autonomous, it follows that they cannot quite be identified as corresponding to an entity outside their frame. “The portrait’s identity is wholly contained within the portrait itself. . . . The person ‘in itself ’ is ‘in’ the painting,” Nancy insists (225). The identity of portraiture is neither the person of the sitter, nor is it the true completion of painting, as Hegel saw it, but it lies in the way it sets itself as subject within a subject-relation. The exposition of the subject is performed in front of a putative subject, Nancy writes, a me or a you (or the painter, for that matter), and it is this setting that is the work of portraiture. This setting is further typified by the particular kind of relation it creates between the portrait and its exterior, yet this exterior can never be used to explain the identity of the subject. It is the relationship with the looking subject as such that is the portrait’s true subject. For Nancy, the portrait thus exhibits an intimacy that is laid out on the picture plane. If we assume for a moment that there is such a thing as an exhibition of intimacy in portraiture, how can we understand it in relation to interiority and exteriority, subject and object, as I have discussed it so far in terms of extimacy? the face becoming eye ¦ 169

Let’s have a close look at Lorenzo Lotto’s Portrait of a Man against a White Curtain (ca. 1506, fig. 49), which Nancy uses to illustrate the role of the portrait in exhibiting intimacy. We see a young man from the chest up, his face in three-quarters view, looking out at the viewer. His lips are not pressed together but fall slightly open, as if he is about to speak. A sliver

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of a white undershirt appears inside of the collar of his dark garment. Apart from a candle burning in the upper right corner (whose meaning has aroused much debate), Lotto painted a typical autonomous portrait in which the young man, detached from his exterior and separated from his background by the white curtain, is devoid of any action or expression. The only thing he does is be there, watching us. It is tempting to recall Wajcman’s statement that the Kantian imperative of thinking by oneself demands only the drawing of a curtain between the self and the world.25 Is Lotto’s young man thinking for himself? He does not seem to be figure 49.  Lorenzo Lotto, Portrait of a Man against a White Curtain, ca. 1506. Oil on wood. Kunshistorisches Museum, Vienna.

particularly absorbed by anything. Yet we have to admit that there is a strong sense of retirement, in spite of his looking out at us. This suggestion of withdrawal is confirmed by the fact that the young man has not been identified, so that the resemblance we find in this painting (as it is obviously a portrait) can be only a resemblance to itself, which is for Nancy a kind of withdrawal into interiority. And yet this interiority has been spread out over the picture’s surface as “an exhibition of his intimacy,” as Nancy writes (238). “The portrait is less the recollection of a (memorable) identity than it is the recollection of an (immemorial) intimacy . . . less the recollection of this intimacy than it is a calling back to it.” This calling back to intimacy occurs through the sitter’s gaze. The picture’s lack of depth results in the impression that its ground has come to the surface—as if to confirm that there is nothing behind this image, neither a true identity nor a revelation of a self. Instead, the young man’s gaze calls, or rather recalls, us: it brings us back to the familiarity and the intimacy of his presence that it evokes. Nancy argues that the young man’s “call” for the viewer—or rather, his gaze recalling his exposed intimacy— implies the presence of a beholder already there.26 Though nothing lies “behind” this image, there is something that comes “before” it: the gaze of the viewer. Nancy describes this gaze of the portrait not as that which can be found “in” painting and around which new space stretches out toward the viewer (as for instance Riegl would have it) but as a kind of hole. From the picture’s ground something opens up, Nancy explains, a kind of opening or orbit that lies at the heart of the figure—in its gaze. Unlike Sartre, who argued that the moment we look into someone’s eyes the gaze has gone, Nancy quotes Wittgenstein, who once said (in Zettel, §221) that when you see the eye, “you see something go out from it. You see the blink [Blick] of an eye” (245). Through the hole of the eyes of Lotto’s young man, we see the gaze at the very moment of its withdrawal from the eyes. It is around

the face becoming eye ¦ 171

this departure of the look that the figure revolves. Though the sitter may not be looking at anything in particular, the portrait watches out at us, in the sense of guarding over us (the original meaning of the French regarder, to look). Following Hegel to this extent, Nancy therefore claims that the portrait is concerned. It watches over us, its viewers; its look concerns us, it literally regards us in the French sense of the word. In the previous chapter we saw that for Wajcman, Renaissance painting, despite its being considered a window, in fact closed its shutters onto the world to open up toward the subject. Partly in line with this idea, yet without basing his arguments on psychoanalysis, Nancy arrives at a slightly different claim when he sees an orbit in the sitter’s eyes—not as a hole in the painting through which the viewer can enter but as an opening onto the world. Nancy explains how a relation between subject and the world is established through the portrait’s look. The portrait does not look at anything in particular as it looks out for itself. Not only is a subject unable to look without a look directed back at him or her (243), but the self looks out for itself, Nancy writes, “because it loses its way,” because being itself takes place only in the world that is outside itself. In the portrait we see how the subject looks out for itself: its interiority takes place outside of it, somewhere in the world in which its look is directed. In fact, as the figure is organized around the departing gaze, it is not just the eyes that seem to do the looking: “The painting looks with its entire painterly being,” Nancy states. There is no such thing as a figure and a ground against which it is set. On the contrary, its ground has opened up to become the look. Indeed, what is ultimately fundamental about the portrait is that “the entire face becomes an eye” (243). In fact, Nancy describes the gaze as being a profound aspect of portraiture that lies at its core while it fills its entire being (much as Dolar observes that the gaze “fills” a moment, a room, a life). And there is one category of portraiture in which the entire face has become an eye, one that does look with its entirely painterly being. That is the class of eye portraits. If we now look again at Byron’s eye, we can, with Nancy, disregard the issue of its identification as its most fundamental aspect, or as the riddle that we as art historians are supposed to solve. Regardless of how compelling it may be to claim the eye to be Byron’s—and I’d rather not see a closing of the case, but a temporarily bypassing of it—ultimately the image does not revolve around this issue but around a look that looks out. Neither part of a face nor of a larger image, this little image has no other interiority, no other intimacy, than the exposition of look itself, in the double sense of displaying and dislocating it. If, as Nancy claims (in line with Wajcman, in 172 ¦ chapter  5

fact), interiority can take (its) place only within exteriority, it follows that if there is no interiority other than the world, portraits in general, and eye portraits in particular, draw out this kind of intimacy while the gaze heads forward—into space outside of the picture frame—toward us. The look that departs is what has been captured by eye pictures. It is only in eye portraits that we see a total sense of being—as being lost—in a look. Indeed, for Nancy portraiture is an encounter, a relation established between two subjects, one inside and one outside painting, whose looks plunge into one another (246). This encounter is intensified (expanded as for Bachelard only a miniature can do) as the only subject of the tiny tableau, now that the portrait is defaced so as to let the look reign. Byron’s eye portrait, and others like it, demonstrate how this look is indeed “lost,” in the sense of having been cut loose from the face, from painting, from portraiture even, if mounted on brooches and pendants, while symptomatically showing its departure. Or as Nancy formulates: To be lost in a look; isn’t this what we mean by painting? But drawn thus outside of itself in the act of its being painted, the look becomes the evidence of a world that is exposed less before me as a spectacle than through me as a force that opens my eyes in the eyes of the painting, in the opening out and bedazzlement that painting certainly does not represent but that it is or that it paints, since in what we call “art,” to paint or to portray, means nothing less than the sense or meaning of being and so of being in the world. The painted look plunges into this in. (247, italics in original)

In light of Nancy’s statement on the portrait’s gaze, we could say that what is miniaturized in eye portraits is the interiority of the viewpoint that, structured as a part object, is the epitome of painting rather than its exception. It is miniaturized to the extent that it is almost vanishing before our eyes, and we seem to be catching a glimpse of the quintessential moment of painting as it is withdrawing itself from the scene. It is a typically vanishing mediator in Hegel’s terms, which disappears from view after having brought together the two poles of subject and object, image and glance, vision and painting. At the beginning of this book, I posed the question what, in eye portraits, has been left of portraiture. We may have finally arrived at an answer when we combine the thoughts of Nancy and Bachelard in order to claim that the circuit that has been opened up by the departure of the look is completed in this being lost in a look (comparable to the kind of daydreaming Bachelard has explored), which creates a kind of space in which one is the face becoming eye ¦ 173

alone with oneself—lost from the world. What remains in eye pictures is the portrait’s intimate concern, its painted look plunging into “being in the world,” as the only way it can lose itself, or release itself. It is the plunging into the “in,” where we see the gaze reaching out, treasuring us. In his essay “The Essential Solitude” Maurice Blanchot wonders: “What happens when what you see, although at a distance, seem to touch you with a gripping contact, when the manner of seeing is a kind of touch, when seeing is contact at a distance? What happens when what is seen imposes itself upon the gaze, as if the gaze were seized, put in touch with the appearance?”27 In this book I hope to have answered these questions by letting the gripping gaze of eye portraits speak for themselves, by allowing them to come toward us as they plunge into the world.

Conclusion The Eye Portrait’s Afterlife

In figure 50, titled Scherzo di Follia, we see Countess de Castligione holding a black passe-partou to her face as if it were a fan. Through the gold-rimmed oval frame, her beautiful heavy-lidded eye throws a seductive look.1 This is doubtless the most famous of an enormous number of photographs that the countess, celebrated in her day for her striking beauty, started to commission in the late 1860s from the photographer Pierre-Louis Pierson (1822–1913). Their collaboration, which lasted for more than thirty years, produced about seven hundred pictures meant for the countess’s exclusive use. Taking into account the sheer number of images produced for her private viewing only, we could speak of a rather spectacular waste. Obviously, the countess as sitter was fully aware that in the process of making these pictures she was “performing herself ” in front of Pierson and no one else, and that she would see and possess the result all by herself. Her awareness is evident in this picture, as she reveals her fascination with her own appearance. 175

Having become emblematic of the medium of photography, this picture acquires an additional dimension in the light of the brief history of eye portraits. As in eye portraits, the frame of the inner gold mount of the passe-partout leaves just enough space to enclose the eyebrow and a small ringlet of hair, while the nose and the rest of the face remain invisible. Were we to crop the photo accordingly, we would be left with a photographic eye portrait. The countess was notorious for staging late entrances to masked balls so that her stunning appearance would make the greatest possible splash.

figure 50.  Pierre-Louis Pierson, Scherzo di Follia, 1863–66, printed 1940s. Gelatin silver print from glass negative. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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In her photographs she similarly attempts to create a momentum when she dresses up to pose as Medea, “La Simple,” “Meditation,” and figures from paintings by Ingres or Greuze.2 She always expresses a clear selfawareness in her use of pictorial elements. Here, consciously raising the photo frame to her eye, her gesture reveals her sharp insight into the (then still young) medium of photography as a vehicle to return her gaze onto herself while fixating it. In light of her interest in iconography, fashion, and the theater, her gesture may have carried echoes of bygone days of performative spying through quizzing glasses and even, wittingly or unwittingly, of intimate viewing of eye pictures.3 As a kind of mirror image in which she can adore herself, this photograph explicates her view on photography as a medium par excellence for staging the two-sidedness of fascination. Not only does the image as such, reflected through the empty opening of the camera, get fixated onto a plate, but the hard stare of an eye forbidden to blink would look back at its viewer at the moment it turns into an image. Blanchot has said that fascination is solitude’s gaze, and this is indeed an apt statement for this picture, as for whom else than herself would she effect such a framing of her gaze? In her article on the portraits of the countess, Abigail Solomon-Godeau argues that the sitter, making a profoundly ambiguous gesture by holding the frame to her face, confuses subject-object positions so as to appear as both image and object of desire.4 She may have intended to fixate herself with her look, Solomon-Godeau writes, as well as fixating herself for reception of the look of others. As a living artifact, the countess has fully assimilated herself to the desire of others, so that “there is no space, language, or means of representation for any desire that might be termed her own” (108). In Lacanian terms, the countess’s desire may have been the desire of the other for her; however, her photos give the impression that she is completely in charge of both sides of the gaze, holding some kind of power over her visibility, guarding it in that respect. She seems less interested in the other’s looking at her or for her and more in her looking at herself via her own gaze. Another photograph taken during the same sitting as Scherzo di Follia offers further confirmation. We see the seated countess in profile, holding up a small oval hand mirror that reflects one eye looking back at us, its viewers, or rather at Pierson, who is likely to be watching the scene while bent over his camera (fig. 51). The reflected eye, isolated from the countess’s beautiful face, is still identifiable yet in its cut-out state appears eerily unfamiliar. Though we know it must be the reflection of the sitter’s concealed eye, it gains a suspicious independence as a faceless form of seeing. the eye portrait’s afterlife ¦ 177

figure 51.  Pierre-Louis Pierson, Comtesse de Castiglione, 1863–66, printed 1940s. Gelatin silver print from glass negative. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

The floating gaze, oddly tactile in its isolation, can best be called uncanny, in the pure sense of an estranged familiarity. The split between eye and gaze as brought out by the framed reflection is radically different from the mirrored reflections in the countess’s other photographs. As with an eye peeping through an eyeglass, its independence as object is further emphasized by its projection against the empty studio backdrop (heavily retouched). The absence of spatial recession results in the impression that the eye picture is hanging on the wall, like a painting. The allusion to the eye portrait’s history and function in this emblematic photo adds a new dimension to the often-made statement that photography killed miniature art. When photography gradually became an accepted mode of portraiture, many miniaturists were forced to replace the working box of fine brushes, watercolors, and pieces of ivory with a camera, headstand, and backdrop. The Belgian painter Antoine Wiertz celebrated this new development when he wrote enthusiastically in 1855 that painting’s future lay in photography. “Let it not be thought that the daguerreotype kills art,” he exclaims. “No, it only kills the work of patience and pays homage to the work of thought.”5 The daguerreotype may have done away with intensive labor, but artistic invention, or thought, has been maintained in the new medium, albeit at the expense of scale. Wiertz declares with confidence that “daguerreotypes will never attain the dimensions of nature.” The painter, whose bold statements on the relation between photography and painting later inspired Walter Benjamin, is in fact suggesting that a rather significant aspect of miniature art has remained in photography: its size. Despite its disappearance and disregard as a portrait-object—once a cultural and personal necessity—the miniature has not been entirely killed off by photography. Part of it lives on quite successfully in the new medium. Indeed, photography embraced the proportions of miniature as the standardized format for the representation of the human figure. Photography has effectively reduced the portrayal of the human body to miniature proportions, a reduction that has become part of photography as the ultimate mode of representation as such. Even in our age of digital imagery, celebration of the human figure in miniature size has persisted. In that sense we may say that it is not the portrait miniature but the lifesize portrait that has suffered most: despite its seeming perseverance as an art form, it has been finally overtaken by photography’s small proportions. Up to the present day, when we bend over a snapshot or an image on a mobile phone to get a better view of it, we reenact not the mode of looking solicited by the grand examples of portraiture’s monumental tradition the eye portrait’s afterlife ¦ 179

but the looking-touching of treasuring a miniature portrait. Though the mode of vision is utterly different, the gesture of looking, the bending toward the picture, is the essentially the same. I suggest that the transition of portraiture from painting to photography occurred through miniature. The portrait miniature has been the mediating factor here, but interestingly, the fundamental role it served in this transition, or in photography as a whole, has not yet been fully explored. There may be a good reason for this neglect. If indeed miniatures in general, and eye miniatures in particular, have served as vanishing mediators in Hegel’s sense of the word, they were bound to disappear from the scene once they had brought painting and photography together. In the gesture of the countess, we see a last glimpse of the eye miniature as it is disappearing, not as an object but as the configuration of intimate vision that it has helped establishing. Thus the countess successfully revived the eye picture’s legacy in photography, not by bringing it up as an object of nostalgia but, consciously or not, by enacting its visual circuit. Indeed, in this famous photograph we see how the eye picture, despite its vanishing, has continued to live on, yet not as minuscule painting but as the intimate vision that forms the basis for small-scale photography. It is less a matter that the this picture has halted the eye portrait’s fall into oblivion, however, and more that we see in Pierson’s picture a first chapter of its future, a trace of its afterlife. If the eye is indeed the life of the miniature (as Hilliard saw it), then it is precisely this “life” that has continued to live on, as an independent subgenre of portrait miniatures that disappeared from the scene of fashion, only to reemerge in photography. As I hope to have demonstrated in this book, the liveliness of the eye is a gaze that is engaged, or rather concerned, as it watches out for its beholder. This is a gaze that escapes from the eye as much as from the realm of painting; it is an extremity that animates the image, that as part-object expresses a desire to guard us as if it were a form of touch—a gaze that is, if not alive, then living, overliving even when it reaches us from beyond the grave. It is this living, concerned, and treasuring gaze that we find in intimate vision.

180 ¦ conclusion

Notes

Introduction 1. Alois Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, trans. Evelyn M. Kain (Malibu, CA: Getty Research Institute, 1999), 74. All page numbers refer to this edition. 2. But not only the sitter’s gaze would be turned toward this quintessential beholder, without whom the picture as such would not quite exist. Roofs of houses, leaves of trees, and cobblestones would obtain the same animated quality of looking out of the picture’s frame into the beholder’s space to meet the beholder’s gaze. This kind of attentiveness seems to animate not just certain elements within the picture but the painting as a whole, as something that is concerned about the beholder, looking out at him or her. See Margaret Olin, “Forms of Respect: Alois Riegl’s Concept of Attentiveness,” Art Bulletin 71, no. 2 (June 1989): 285–99. 3. “Das nur für das vorstellende Subjekt existiert” (281): I depart here from the translation by Evelyn M. Kain and David Britt, and follow Margaret Iversen’s translation in her Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 125. 4. Iversen has elaborated on Riegl’s Hegelianism in ibid., 125–28. 5. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 2:806. 6. Ibid., 1:263–64. 181

7. Henri Maldiney, Regard parole espace (Lausanne: Éditions l’Age d’Homme, 1973), 136ff. 8. The notion of the gaze within painting as the subject of Roman art has been addressed by Jaś Elsner in his marvelous Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), in particular in chap. 4, “Ekphrasis and the Gaze,” and chap. 6, “Viewer as Image.” 9. Maurice Blanchot, “Two Versions of the Imaginary,” in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, ed. George Quasha (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1999), 87. 10. In terms of a history of the gaze, Hans Belting has proposed to examine the gaze’s iconology. See: “Zur Ikonologie des Blicks,” in Ikonologie des Performatieven, ed. Christoph Wulf and Jörg Zirfas (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2005), 50–58. 11. Another reason for studying eye portraits as a “knot” in the history of vision that falls outside the scope of this essay is their emergence around 1800, a period during which the ruptures of modernity generated new models of vision. Most notably, as Foucault has observed, changing forms of visibility resulted in the redefinition of the boundaries separating the visible and the invisible, or instances of seeing and being seen, which ultimately accumulated in things suddenly gaining visibility. Arguing along similar lines but coming to different conclusions, Jonathan Crary has explained how a reorganization of vision in the early nineteenth century produced a new kind of observer who was separated from the observed. Crary argues that whereas in previous centuries vision had been modeled after the camera obscura that privileges representation while excluding the contingency and specificity of a body, optical devices such as the kaleidoscope (invented in 1815) created images that “belonged to the eye,” so to speak. Crary, Techniques of the Observer; On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 1994). 12. W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Images Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005). 13. Jean Starobinski, The Living Eye, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 14. Mieke Bal, Louise Bourgeois’s Spider: The Architecture of Art-Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 5, and the chapter “Tales of Mother Spider.” In her Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), Bal formulates her notion of the theoretical object slightly differently as an artwork that invites us, its viewers, to approach it to see what it “thinks.” See also my “The Pensive Image: On Thought in Jan van Huysum’s Still Life Paintings,” Oxford Art Journal 34, no. 1 (2011): 13–30; and “Reading the Annunciation,” Art History 30, no. 3 (June 2007): 349–63. 15. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 45. 16. Ibid., 54. 17. Ibid., 171. 18. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 69. 19. Ibid., 39. 20. Ibid., 71. See also Seyla Benhabib, “Feminist Theory and Hannah Arendt’s Concept of Public Space,” in American Continental Philosophy: A Reader, ed. Walter

182 ¦ notes to pages 4–11

Brogan and James Risser (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 372–91. 21. Michel de Montaigne, “Of Solitude,” in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1965), 177. 22. Julia Kristeva, Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, trans. J. Herman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 31. See also S. K. Keltner, “What Is Intimacy?” in Psychoanalysis, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Work of Julia Kristeva, ed. Kelly Oliver and S. K. Keltner (New York: State University of New York Press, 2009), 163–79. 23. Lauren Berlant, “Intimacy: A Special Issue,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (Winter 1998): 281–88. 24. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space: The Classic Look at How We Experience Intimate Places, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon, 1994). 25. Gérard Wacjman, Fenêtre: Chroniques du regard et de l’intime (Paris: Collection “Philia” Verdier, 2004). Chapter One 1. Besides Cosway (1742–1821), miniaturists said to have painted eyes include George Engleheart (1750–1829), Charles Hayter (1761–1835), and William Wood (1769–1810) in Britain; Gerhard von Kügelgen (1772–1820) and his pupil Carolina Badura (first half of the nineteenth century) in Germany; Jean-Baptiste Isabey (1767–1855) in France; and Edward Malbone (1777–1807) in the United States. 2. The idea that eye portraits were worn on the inside of a lapel—widespread in documentation in museum files—has never been proved. They could have been attached to ribbons and worn inside the necklines of dresses as well. I am grateful to Aileen Ribeiro for drawing my attention to this possibility. 3. The maker of the snuffbox is Jean-Louis Leferre, who was active around 1803–22 in Paris. The eye portrait painted on ivory is not of his hand and was probably created in the first decade of the nineteenth century. 4. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (London: Routledge, 2002). 5. Numerous other examples include George Engleheart and Mrs. Mills. John Raphael Smith made a mezzotint after this portrait that was published on December 18, 1786. 6. Marcia Pointon, “ ‘Surrounded with Brilliants’: Miniature Portraits in Eighteenth-Century England,” Art Bulletin 83, no. 1 (March 2001): 48–71. 7. For a detailed discussion of Batoni’s painting, see Angus Trumble, “A Roman Holiday—Pompeo Batoni and Sir Sampson Gideon,” Art and Australia 36, no. 1 (1998): 84–7; and Edgar Peters Bowron and Peter Björn Kerber, Pompeo Batoni: Prince of Painters in Eighteenth-Century Rome (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 69. 8. Ibid., 69. 9. William Hazlitt, “Sitting for One’s Picture,” in The Complete Works, ed. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London: J. J. Dent and Sons, 1930–34), vol. 12, essay 11, 107–116. See also Angela Rosenthal, “She’s Got the Look! Eighteenth-Century Female Portrait Painters and the Psychology of a Potentially ‘Dangerous Employment,’ ” in Portraiture: Facing the Subject, ed. Joanna Woodall (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 147–66. 10. Hazlitt, “Sitting for One’s Picture,” 113. 11. Harry Berger Jr., Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt against the Italian Renaissance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 175.

notes to pages 11–28 ¦ 183

12. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 13. In chapter 5, I will elaborate on Jean-Luc Nancy’s similar point about Lotto’s sitters in terms of a withdrawal of the self in combination with an aggressive exhibition of intimacy. Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Look of the Portrait,” in Multiple Arts: The Muses II (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 238–39. 14. Berger, Fictions of the Pose, 226. See also Patricia Simons, “Women in Frames: The Gaze, the Eye, the Profile in Renaissance Portraiture,” History Workshop 25 (1988). 15. Choderlos de Laclos, Dangerous Liaisons (London: Penguin Classics, 2007), 352. 16. Quoted in Ruth Perry, Women, Letters, and the Novel (New York: AMS Press, 1980), 128. 17. Annette Peach, “Portraits of Byron,” in Sixty-Second Volume of the Walpole Society (London: Walpole Society, 2000), 48. 18. It was the fashion for a married woman to wear a portrait of her husband on her body. Although she did not invent the fashion, Queen Charlotte set the tone by wearing a miniature portrait of her husband, King George III, over her heart or set in the famous pearl bracelet with which she liked to be portrayed. In 1786 Mrs. Warren Hastings wrote to her friend Sophie von la Roche that she proposed “to set a new fashion of wearing men’s portraits in the buckle of one’s belt.” Quoted in Shirley Bury, An Introduction to Sentimental Jewelry (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1985), 237. 19. The sitter’s face and hairstyle bear slight similarities to an unknown lady painted by William Armfield Hobday in 1797 wearing a portrait of a male sitter on a neck pendant. The reverse shows hair and a seed-pearl ornament set with gilt initials H.E. This portrait-object is now in the Kenwood Collection. See Katy Carter, Miniatures at Kenwood: The Draper Gift (London: English Heritage, 1997), cat. no. 80, 182–83. 20. See also Marie-Claire Grassi and Neil Gordon, “Friends and Lovers (or the Codification of Intimacy),” Yale French Studies 71 (1986): 77–92. 21. Stella Tillyard, Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox. 1740–1832 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), 98. Also mentioned by Pointon, “Surrounded with Brilliants,” 68. 22. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). All page numbers refer to this edition. 23. Patricia Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 70. All page numbers refer to this edition. 24. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space: The Classic Look at How We Experience Intimate Places, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon, 1994). All page numbers refer to this edition. 25. Elizabeth Griffith, The Delicate Distress, A Novel: In Letters, 2 vols. (Dublin, 1787), 2:32. Chapter Two 1. Shane Leslie, Mrs Fitzherbert: A Life Chiefly from Unpublished Sources (New York: Benzinger Brothers, 1939), appendix 1, 370. 2. Many copies of Mrs. Fitzherbert’s eye made after Cosway survive, including one currently in the Royal Collection (B1827) that was previously part of the collec-

184 ¦ notes to pages 28–47

tion of J. Pierpont Morgan (see George C. Williamson, Catalogue of the Miniatures in the Collection of J. Pierpont Morgan [London: privately printed at Chiswick Press, 1906], vol. 11, no. 252) and two versions, one of them set in a steel frame, that were exhibited at the Dowdeswell Gallery in 1905, as indicated in George C. Williamson, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Miniatures of Eyes by Richard Cosway, George Engleheart & Others . . . (London: Dowdeswell Galleries, 1905), nos. 17 and 31. 3. Especially Marcia Pointon’s article “ ‘Surrounded with Brilliants’: Miniature Portraits in Eighteenth-Century England,” Art Bulletin 83, no. 1 (March 2001): 48–71. 4. George C. Williamson and Henry L. D. Engleheart, George Engleheart, 1750– 1829; Miniature Painter to George III (London: George Bell and Sons, 1902), 110. 5. Lloyd, “Cosway Inventory,” 171, 196–97, and fig. 96. See also note 2 above. 6. Apparently Cosway wrote in a letter to Emma Kendrick that “there should be room in the face for an eye between the two eyes.” Emma Kendrick, Conversations on the Art of Miniature Painting (London, n.p., 1830). See also George C. Williamson, Richard Cosway (London: George Bell and Sons, 1905), 107. 7. Daphne Foskett, Miniatures: Dictionary and Guide (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1987), 536. 8. Lady Eleanor Butler, in G. H. Bell, ed., The Hamwood Papers of the Ladies of Llangollen and Caroline Hamilton (London: Macmillan, 1930), 65. 9. Horace Walpole, Letters Addressed to the Countess of Ossory, from the Year 1769 to 1797, ed. R. Vernon Smith (London: Richard Bentley, 1848), 2:250, letter 273. 10. Robert Isherwood, Farce and Fantasy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 222. 11. Mary Martin, “Eye Portraits,” Connoisseur 72 (July 1925): 140–45. 12. Max von Boehn, Miniatures and Silhouettes, trans. E. K. Walker (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1928), 145. See also Marcia Pointon, “Liaisons Dangereuses: Buttons, Buttonholes and the Materials of Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century England,” in Russian Fashion Theory, ed. Irina Prokhorova, English-language version (Moscow: New Literary Observer, 2010). 13. Madame Grand was the mistress of Talleyrand, and it was a public secret that they lived together. Of Madame Grand it was known that when Talleyrand wanted to break off his relationship with her, she entered their reception room where a large crowd had gathered, wearing a miniature portrait of her lover around her neck, and declared her love for him. Talleyrand married her the next day, defying Napoleon’s wish that he end the relationship. 14. The often-mentioned claim that Louis Petit de Bachaumont is the chronicle’s author is most likely not true. Quoted in Boehn, Miniatures and Silhouettes, 145. See the edition compiled by Bernadette Fort, Les Salons des “Mémoires Secrets,” 1767–1787 (Paris: École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, 1999). 15. Interesting in this regard is also Francisco Goya’s Portrait of the Family of the Duke and Duchess of Osuna (ca. 1787, Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado). The Duchess of Osuna is sitting on a chair, surrounded by her husband and four young children. The hand that holds a letter also displays a miniature portrait on her wrist that visually rhymes with the buttons on her dress. 16. For an example of such etched buttons displaying eyes, see Diana Epstein and Millicent Safro, Buttons (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1991), 87. 17. Friedrich II von Preussen, Das Palladion: Ein ernsthaftes Gedicht in 6 Gesängen, ed. Jürgen Ziechmann (Bremen: Edition Ziechmann, 1985), 1:202–20, fig. 1; Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, Sehende Bilder: Die Geschichte des Augenmotivs seit dem 19. Jahr-

notes to pages 47–52 ¦ 185

hundert (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1992), 75–77; Johannes Kunisch, “Henri de Catt, Vorleser und Gesprächspartner Friedrichs des Grossen—Versuch einer Typologie,” in Schweizer im Berlin des 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. Martin Fontius and Helmut Holzhey (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1994), 116. 18. André Girodi, Le “Diarium” du miniaturiste Georges-Antoine Keman de Sélestat (1784–1816) (Strasbourg, France: Librarie Istra, 1925). 19. Engleheart painted at least twenty-seven eyes between 1783 and 1806, according to his Fee-Book, including eyes for several members of the Beauchamp and Metcalf families. Williamson and Engleheart, George Engleheart, 32–33. See app. 1, “List of the Persons who sat to George Engleheart from 1775 to 1813, extracted from the Fee-Book.” 20. Miniature portraits of two eyes are unconvincing as independent pictures and often look like failed portrait miniatures with the unsuccessful parts of the face removed. Therefore, I do not consider them part of the vogue for eye miniatures. Examples of miniatures of two eyes can be found in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Musée Carnavalet in Paris. 21. I thank Thomas Kemp for assisting me in locating this unusual portrait. 22. Stephen Lloyd and Kim Sloane, The Intimate Portrait: Drawings, Miniatures and Pastels from Ramsay to Lawrence (Edinburgh: National Gallery of Scotland, 2008). 23. Julie Aronson and Marjorie E. Wieseman, Perfect Likeness: European and American Portrait Miniatures from the Cincinnati Art Museum (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 168–69. 24. The popularity of eye portraits reached the Continent around 1800, and there they continued to be produced until approximately 1850. By that time they were no longer fashionable in Britain. 25. A late-nineteenth-century eye by Guiseppe Sacco (1805–89), one of very few that can be attributed, became known when it was selected for the cover of La rime et la raison: La Collection Ménil (Houston–New York), exh. cat. (Paris: Galleries Nationals des Grand Palais, 1984). See also Foskett, Miniatures, 636. 26. Charles Dickens, Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son: Whole Sale, Retain and for Exportation, 3 vols. (London, 1897), 1:9, 104. 27. Royal Archives, Windsor Castle, Vic/QVJ/1857:20 November. 28. Royal Archives, Windsor Castle, Vic/Add T231. 29. A series of eye miniatures very much like the ones found in Musée Condé can be found in the Family Foundation of Hessen at Schloss Wolfsgarten in Langen, Germany. I am grateful to Bernd Pappe for drawing my attention to these eye portraits. 30. The diamond frames and golden bracelets have been stolen. 31. I am grateful to Vanessa Remington for having shared this information with me. (Royal Archives, Windsor Castle, 1858; probably sold at auction at Sotheby’s Billingshurst, June 27, 1978, lot 79). See also Remington, Victorian Miniatures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen (London: Royal Collection Enterprises, 2010). 32. For more information about Watts and Lady Augusta Holland, see Barbara Bryant, G. F. Watts, Portraits: Fame and Beauty in Victorian Society (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2004), 40–49, and Veronica Franklin Gould, G. F. Watts: The Last Great Victorian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press / London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2004), 12–15. 33. Other possible candidates to have painted the eye in the yellow drawing room include Livorni, an Italian painter who worked at Holland House for a short

186 ¦ notes to pages 53–59

period in the 1840s and 1850s. See G. S. Holland Fox-Strangways, Earl of Ilchester, Chronicles of Holland House, 1820–1900 (London: John Murray, 1937), 322–23. 34. Quoted in ibid., 322–23. 35. Burlington Fine Arts Club, 1889, p. 128, no. 57. This duplicate ended up in the collection of J. Pierpont Morgan: Williamson, Catalogue of the Miniatures in the Collection of J. Pierpont Morgan, vol. 11, no. 252. See also Vanessa Remington and Christopher Lloyd, Masterpieces in Little: Portraiture Miniatures in the Collection of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1996). 36. Gisela Zick, Freundschafts- und Memorialschmuck, 1770–1870 (Dortmund, Germany: Die bibliophilen Tashenbücher, 1980), plate 31, 160. 37. Schmidt-Burkhardt, Sehende Bilder, 25. 38. Hubert Glaser, ed., Krone und Verfassung: König Max I. Joseph under der neue Staat, exh. cat. (Munich: Wittelsbach under Bayeren / Völkerkundemuseum, 1980), 613. 39. Ruel Pardee Tolman, The Life and Works of Edward Greene Malbone, 1777–1807 (New York: New York Historical Society, 1958), 185. The eye portrait of Maria Miles Heyward is currently in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. 40. In addition to Cosway and Engleheart, Daphne Foskett mentions Charles Hayter, William Grimaldi, N. Feese, J. F. Sharpe, L. Vaslet, Anthony Stewart, and William Wood as British miniaturists who painted eyes. Foskett, Miniatures, 24–25. See also Foskett’s two-page article “Eye Miniatures,” Antique Collecting 21, no. 4 (September 1986): 14–15, Schmidt-Burkhardt, Sehende Bilder, 24–25. Donough O’Brien claims to have seen a large eye portrait of Madame Talleyrand that was signed by the French miniaturist Jean-Baptiste Isabey (present location unknown). Miniatures in the XVIIIth and XIXth Centuries: A Historical and Descriptive Record (London: B. T. Batsford, 1951), 10. 41. The inscription on this particular miniature is not followed by a question mark. 42. Paul Caffrey, Treasures to Hold: Irish and English Miniatures, 1650–1850, from the National Gallery of Ireland Collection (Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland, 2000), 63. On Wedgwood’s cameo, see Mary Guyatt, “The Wedgwood Slave Medallion: Values in Eighteenth-century Design,” Journal of Design History 13, no. 2 (2000): 93–105. 43. Elisabeth Wormsbächer, Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki: Erklärungen under Erläuterungen zu seinen Radierungen (Hannover: Kunstbuchverlag Galerie J. H. Bauer, 1988), 193 (E. 587). 44. Ernst Gombrich, The Use of Images: Studies in the Social Function of Art and Visual Communication (London: Phaidon, 1999), 178. 45. Wormsbächer, Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki, 193. 46. Gombrich, Uses of Images, 176. 47.For an English edition, see Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, or Moral Emblems (London: Benj. Motte, 1709), fig. 258. 48. For more particulars about Elizabethan somatic symbolism, see Louis Montrose, “Idols of the Queen: Policy, Gender and the Picturing of Queen Elizabeth,” Representations 68 (1999): 108–61; and Roy Strong’s Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987). 49. Fabre d’Églantine wrote: “We conceive of nothing without the aid of images. Without images, the most abstract analysis, [and] the most metaphysical reasoning lie beyond our grasp; it is only by and through images that we are able to remember.”

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Quoted in Gombrich, Use of Images, 165. 50. Gombrich, Use of Images, 177. 51. Klaus Herding, “Robespierre und die Magie der Zeichen: Zum Augensymbol unter der Revolution,” in Bildfälle: Die Moderne im Zwielicht, ed. Beat Wyss (Zurich: Verlag für Architektur Artemis, 1990), 38–54. 52. Gombrich, Use of Images, 178, fig. 241. 53. Eye miniatures had probably not been publicly displayed as a category until the miniature expert George Charles Williamson organized a 1905 exhibition of “miniatures and eyes” in London, a show that aroused the interest of collectors in these all-but-forgotten items. Williamson had a small collection of eye portraits that included eyes of his children and himself that were rendered by Alyn Williams at the beginning of the twentieth century. Williamson, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Miniatures of Eyes, 1905. 54. Schmidt-Burkhardt devotes a chapter to eye portraits in her book on the history of the eye motif in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art, largely seeing the eye miniature as a romantic token of affection and considering it a prelude to the fascination with the eye of Odilon Redon and, later, the surrealists. 55. Eighteenth-century printed portraits that feature a disembodied eye set in a triangular frame on a stick could have been a source of inspiration to the inventor of eye miniatures. See, for instance, J. E. Nilson’s engraving of Juliana Maria, Queen of Denmark, Royal Library, Windsor Castle. 56. Majorie Garber, Symptoms of Culture (London: Routledge, 1998). Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts (London: Penguin, 1970), 56. 57. In Hegelian dialectics, a vanishing mediator negotiates the synthesis resulting from the opposition between thesis and antithesis. This concept has been elaborated in psychoanalytic discourse by Lacan and Žižek, as well as Fredric Jameson. 58. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, Georgiana: Extracts from the Correspondence of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, ed. Vere Ponsonby, Ninth Earl of Bessborough (London: John Murray, 1955), 103. 59. George Charles Williamson, Richard Cosway, R.A. and his Wife and Pupils; Miniaturists of the Eighteenth Century (London: n.p., 1897), 98. 60. According to Williamson, several replicas of Mrs. Fitzherbert’s eye were made by Cosway. Williamson, (as in note 2), 188–89. Williamson mentions an eye of Mrs. Fitzherbert by Cosway that is mounted in a steel frame. Williamson, Richard Cosway, R.A., no. 17. 61. For instance, see Johan Zoffany’s portrait of Queen Charlotte (1771, Collection of Her Majesty the Queen). 62. Pointon describes how the fashion for wearing miniatures was established when the Duchess of Kinston was presented at court in 1769 wearing a picture of the Electress of Saxony on her left shoulder (Pointon, “Surrounded with Brilliants,” 53). It then became common to wear miniatures on the body. See also Diana Scarisbrick, Jewellery in Britain, 1066–1837: A Documentary, Social, Literary and Artistic Survey (Wilby, UK: Michael Russell, 1994). 63. Pointon, “Surrounded with Brilliants,” 59. 64. Christopher Lloyd and Vanessa Remington, Masterpieces in Little: Portrait Miniatures from the Collection of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, exh. cat. (London: Royal Collection Enterprises, 1996), 41. 65. The exhibition of eye portraits organized by Williamson in London in 1905 included two eyes attributed to Richard Cosway that were believed to be those of Lord

188 ¦ notes to pages 68–72

Nelson and Lady Hamilton. The attributions as well as the identifications are doubtful, however; an eye with the name of Lady Hamilton engraved on the reverse used to be part of the collection of Musée Carnavalet in Paris. This eye disappeared and was probably stolen. Williamson, Richard Cosway, R.A., p.,7, no. 21. See also David W. Bain, “A Tale of Two Rings,” Nelson Disparu 4 (January 1991): 9–11. 66. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Letter to d’Alembert and Writings for the Theater,” in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. and trans. Allan Bloom et al. (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2004), 10:332, 344. 67. Choderlos de Laclos, Dangerous Liaisons, trans. Helen Constantine (London: Penguin Classics, 2007), letter 29. 68. Pointon, “Surrounded with Brilliants,” 63. 69. Whereas letters, portraits, and cameos frequently appear in miniatures produced prior to 1800, the eyeglass or lorgnette emerges only after the turn of the century. 70. See Allison Goudie, “Self-Reflexive Spying, or Why the Mask Fan Is More Than the Sum of Its Parts,” master’s thesis, University of Oxford, 2010. 71. Cited in Richard Corson, Fashions in Eyeglasses (London: Peter Owen, 1967), 88. 72. Barbara Benedict, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 73. Corson, Fashions in Eyeglasses, 88. 74. Ibid. 75. Mary Darly, The Optic Curls, or the Obligeing Head Dress, from Darly’s Comic Prints of Characters, Caricatures, Macaronies, &c. (London: Mary Darly, 1776–79). On hairstyles, wigs, and macaroni caricature, see Lynn Festa, “Personal Effects: Wigs and Possessive Individualism in the Long Eighteenth Century,” Eighteenth-Century Life 29, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 47–90; Amalia Rauser, “Hair, Authenticity, and the Self-Made Macaroni,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 38, no. 1 (2004): 101–17; Shearer West, “The Darly Macaroni Prints and the Politics of ‘Private Man,’ ” Eighteenth-Century Life 25 (Spring 2001): 170–182. 76. This statement was made by Aileen Ribeiro in “The Macaronis,” History Today 28 (July 1978): 466. 77. Quoted in West, “Darly Macaroni Prints,” 170. 78. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 1:86. 79. Juliette Merritt, “Introduction—Gazing in the Eighteenth Century: Eliza Haywood’s Specular Negotiations,” in Beyond Spectacle: Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectators (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 3–24. 80. On object narratives, see Deidre Shauna Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 95–96; Christopher Flint, “Speaking Objects: The Circulation of Stories in Eighteenth-Century Prose Fiction,” PMLA 113, no. 2 (March 1998): 212–26. 81. Corson, Fashions in Eyeglasses, 88. 82. Benedict, Curiosity, 142–43. 83. Roland Barthes, “The Eiffel Tower,” in The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 4–5. Chapter Three 1. Eye miniatures, like (hair) jewelry, were handed over to loved ones after death.

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Lady Hamilton’s eye picture was given to Lord Nelson after the first owner, Lord Hamilton, had died. See chapter 2, note 65. 2. As stated in the introduction, the term “looking for” has been borrowed from Nancy and Riegl; however, my exploration has been inspired as well by Robert Nelson’s deliberately awkward term “looking with.” In his wonderful essay “Empathetic Vision,” he analyzes the intimate viewing conditions of Byzantine illuminated manuscripts in terms of performativity, arguing that some manuscript illuminations call attention to a certain kind of vision that should not be termed “looking at” or “looking upon” but instead “looking with.” Making a distinction between etic and emic qualities of showing, between displaying an artwork in the sense of unfolding it and seeing it as a public performance, Nelson demonstrates that illuminations invite beholders to look “with” them in a theatrical way. They are instances of empathic viewing, a kind of vision, essentially understood as touch, modeled on the extramission theory (widespread in the Byzantine era) that claims that seeing occurs when rays of light fall from the eye to “grasp” objects. Crying eye portraits may be understood as representing an instance of empathic viewing. Nelson, “Empathic Vision: Looking at and with a Performative Byzantine Miniature,” Art History, 30, no. 4 (September 2007): 489–502. See also Bissera V. Pentcheva, The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual and the Senses in Byzantium (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010). 3. Marcia Pointon, “Material Mourning: Hair, Jewellery and the Body,” in Material Memories, ed. Marius Kwint, Christopher Breward, and Jeremy Aynsley (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 39–57. See also Pointon, “Valuing the Visual and Visualizing the Valuable: Jewellery and Its Ambiguities,” Cultural Values 3, no. 1 (1999): 1–27. 4. Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Memoirs of Madame Vigée Lebrun, translated by Lionel Strachey (orig. 1903; New York: G. Braziller, 1989), chap. 7. 5. Bury, Introduction to Sentimental Jewelry, 37. 6. Lady Mary Coke, quoted in ibid. 7. Mrs. Delany, quoted in Scarisbrick, Jewellery in Britain, 266. 8. At the end of the century, when hairstyle fashions slowly turned away from the wig toward a more natural, unpowdered look, hair jewelry became even more intricate. 9. Friedrich Schlegel later thought along similar lines when he wrote that words are tears, and so did Samuel Beckett. See Tom Lutz, Crying: A Natural and Cultural History of Tears (London: W. W. Norton, 2001), 51. 10. Ibid. 11. The relation between tears and sincerity was famously made by Rousseau; see ibid. and Anne Vincent-Buffault, The History of Tears: Sensibility and Sentimentality in France (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1991), 1–97. 12. Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling (reprint Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 26. 13. Ibid., 27. 14. Vincent-Buffault, History of Tears, 7. See also James Elkins, Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings (New York: Routledge, 2004). 15. It surprised no one when readers became emotional out of pure sympathy for the novel’s weeping protagonists. Private letters reveal that readers found great pleasure in weeping over their novels and apparently found equal pleasure in writing to friends and family members about their weeping experiences. 16. Psychologist Silvan Tomkins wrote in his Affect, Imagery, Consciousness (New York: Springer, 1962), that affects have a complex, self-referential life that gives depth

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to human existence through our relations with others and with ourselves. 17. Quoted in Vincent-Buffault, History of Tears, 63. 18. In Saint Marie Magdalens Funeral Teares (1591) Robert Southwell describes tears as mighty orators. 19. On the reverse we find an inscription indicating that this ring was worn in memory of Cath Motley, who died at age sixty-nine in December 1786 (ca. 1786, Barbara Robbins Collection). 20. See Stephen Lloyd, Portrait Miniatures from the Collection (Edinburg: Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 2006), and Richard Cosway (London: Unicorn, 2005). 21. J. G. Lavater, Essai sur la physiognomie, vol. 3 (The Hague, 1786), reproduced in Francis Haskell, History and Its Images (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 154. 22. Christiane Holm, “Sentimental Cuts: Eighteenth-Century Mourning Jewelry with Hair,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 38, no. 1 (2004): 139. 23. Jonathan Culler, “Apostrophe,” in The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 150. 24. William Wordsworth, “Upon Epitaphs,” in Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism, ed. Nowell C. Smith (1905; reissued Bristol, UK: Bristol Classic, 1980), 85. See also Cynthia Chase’s classic article “Monuments and Inscriptions: Wordsworth’s Lines,” Diacritics 17, no. 4 (Winter 1987): 66–77. 25. In his interpretation of Wordsworth’s “Upon Epitaphs,” Paul de Man therefore declares prosopopoeia the trope of autobiography par excellence because it not only gives a face to a naked name but restores as well as de-faces the notion of self in discourse. Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-facement,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). 26. See Bury, Introduction to Sentimental Jewellery, 38, figs. 27 and 28. 27. Erwin Panofsky, “Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1970). For a further unpacking of the problematic notion of “ego” in the phrase Et in Arcadia ego, see Louis Marin’s essay “The Tomb of the Subject in Painting,” in On Representation, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001). 28. Gisela Zick, Gedenke mein: Freundschafts- und Memorialschmuck, 1770–1870 (Dortmund, Germany: Die Bibliophilen Taschenbücher, 1980), 143. See also Scarisbrick, Jewellery in Britain, 263–64. 29. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to the West Wind and Other Poems (Dover, UK: Dover, 1993), 35–37. 30. Charlotte Turner Smith, Elegiac Sonnets (London, 1786), 32. 31. Starobinski, Living Eye, 4. I have borrowed the coinage “overlived” from Emily R. Wilson’s Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). 32. Another example is the silhouette, whose relation to its referent is indexical as it outlines the actual shadow cast by the model. 33. This information is derived from Allison Goudie, “The Wax Portrait as Trompe l’Oeil? A Case Study of Queen Maria Carolina of Naples,” master’s thesis, University of Oxford, 2010. 34. “Von Gerardezu erschreckender Lebendigkeit ist die Büste Ferdinands IV. Von Neapel; die Lebenstreue wird hier bienahe zur Indiskretion.” Julius von Schlosser, Tote Blicke: Geschichte der Porträtbildnerei in Wachs, ein Versuch, ed. Thomas Medicus (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993), 80. Schlosser’s text has been translated by

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James Michael Loughridge as “History of Portraiture in Wax,” in Ephemeral Bodies: Wax Sculpture and the Human Figure, ed. Roberta Panzanelli (Malibu, CA: Getty, 2008), 171–314. 35. Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Image—the Distinct,” in The Ground of the Image, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 9. 36. Georges Didi-Huberman, “Viscosities and Survivals: Art History Put to the Test by the Material,” in Ephemeral Bodies, ed. Panzanelli, 155. 37. Roberta Panzanelli considers wax as a disappearing medium in her “Introduction: The Body in Wax, the Body of Wax,” in Ephemeral Bodies, 1–12. See also Didi-Huberman’s discussion of the survival of the medium in his “Viscosities and Survivals” in the same book, 154–70. 38. On guillotined heads and their relation to portraiture, see Daniel Arasse’s marvelous The Guillotine and the Terror, trans. Christopher Miller (London: Penguin, 1989). For the relation between the guillotine and houses of wax, see Pamela Pilbeam, Madam Tussaud and the History of Wax (London: Hambledon and London, 2003). 39. Uta Kornmeier has called a Madame Tussaud’s wax portrait of Queen Victoria a trompe l’oeil in her essay “Almost Alive: The Spectacle of Verisimilitude in Madame Tussaud’s Waxworks,” in Ephemeral Bodies, ed. Panzanelli, 67–82. 40. On the Pygmalion effect, see Victor Stoichita’s masterly The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock, trans. Alison Anderson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 41. For the relation of waxen heads and death masks, see Arasse, The Guillotine and the Terror, and Regina James, Losing Our Heads: Beheadings in Literature and Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2005). 42. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s, 1965), 180–87. 43. Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 65. 44. This section is largely based on Nancy’s reading of the passage of Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics in his essay “Masked Imagination” in Ground of the Image. 45. Michael Ann Holly, “Mourning and Method,” Art Bulletin 84, no. 4 (December 2002): 660–69; Sarah Kofman, “The Melancholy of Art,” in Selected Writings, ed. Thomas Albrecht, Georgie Albert, and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 205–17. 46. Kofman, “Melancholy of Art,” 207. 47. Starobinski, Living Eye, 4. Chapter Four 1. The spelling of her name was changed to Josefina after her arrival in Sweden. 2. Gisela Zick argues for this possibility in Gedenke mein, 159. On the same bracelet, see also Hubert Glaser, ed., Krone und Verfassung: König Max I: Joseph under der neue Staat, exh. cat. (Munich: Wittelsbach under Bayeren / Völkerkundemuseum, 1980), cat. no. 1164. 3. Another known example of a mother’s eye is that of Lady Pamela Fitzgerald, adopted child of Madame de Genlis, who served as tutor to the Duc d’Orleans’s children—Pamela was thought to be her child by the duke. Lady Fitzgerald sent her young daughter Helen a small pendant to wear around the neck with a portrait of her eye inscribed “l’oeil de la mere.” Estranged from her second husband, the American 192 ¦ notes to pages 113–126

consul to Hamburg, Pamela left for England never to return, leaving Helen unaware that her mother was alive, as her father told her that she had died. Lucy Ellis and Joseph Turquan, La Belle Pamela (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1924), 399. 4. “In einem standigen Trubel sein, in ununterbrocherner Bewegung, immer an andere denken, an das, was um einen vorgeht, wenn man uberhaupt Zeit zum Denken hat, das ist night leben. . . . Ich fuhle mich nirgens so wohl as in meinen grosen Fauteuil mit einer Handarbeit in Gedanken daruber, was ich gesehen, getan und gedacht habe und komme zu dem Schluss, das ich etwas lerne.” Quoted in Adalbert Prinz Von Bayern, The Herzen der Leuchtenberg: Cronik einer napoleonisch-bayerisch-europaischen Familie (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1952), 93. 5. “Ich bilde mir ein Urteil, einen Verhaltungsplan in deiser oder jener Angelegenheit, die kommen kann, so dass ich nicht überrumpelt werde.” Ibid. 6. Melanie Klein, “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms,” Journal of Psychotherapy Practice and Research 5, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 164. This essay was originally published in 1946. 7. This position Klein has defined as paranoid-schizoid. When the ego is capable of seeing that good and bad can exist together in the same, whole person, it can continue to be frustrated with the mother for the anxiety she causes, but instead of feeling persecuted, the ego experiences only guilt. This is what Klein has called the depressive position. Klein’s depressive and paranoid-schizoid states are not mere phases in a baby’s normal development but rather positions that we continue to take in during our lifetime. 8. Julia Kristeva, Melanie Klein, translated by Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 62–63. 9. Otto Fenichel, “The Scoptophilic Instinct and Identification,” in The Collected Papers of Otto Fenichel, ed. H. Fenichel and D. Rapaport (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954), 373–97. 10. Rosalind E. Krauss, “The Uncanny,” in Formless: A User’s Guide, ed. R. E. Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 156. 11. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1977), 315. 12. Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 128. 13. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London: Routledge, 2003), 281–326. 14. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 96. 15. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 200. 16. Kaja Silverman has elaborated on the notion of playing with the screen. Though I do not agree with her suggestion, based on the work of Cindy Sherman, that the camera takes in the position of the Gaze, her discussion of the image-screen as a network of social conditions is highly interesting. See the chapters “The Look” and “The Screen” in The Threshold of the Visible World (London: Routledge, 1996). 17. Lacan, Écrits, 315. 18. “So ist es, wenn man es betrachtet, als ob einem die Augenlider weggeschnitten wären.” “Empfindugen vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft.” Heinrich von Kleist, Sämmtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Helmut Sembalner, 2 vols. (Munich: Hanser, 1952), 2:437–38. This text has been translated by Jason Gaigner as “Emotions before Fried-

notes to pages 128–140 ¦ 193

rich’s Seascape” and included in Art in Theory, 1648–1815: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaigner (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 1031–32. See also Heinz-Georg Held, Romantik (Cologne: Dumont, 2003), 82–84. I thank Kevin Hilliard for drawing my attention to Kleist’s text. 19. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 101. 20. Ibid., 89. 21. Adrian Stokes, “Venice,” in The Critical Writings of Adrian Stokes (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), 2:137. 22. Ibid. 23. Adrian Stokes, “Form in Art: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 18, no. 2 (December 1959): 196. 24. Ronald Bogue has provided a very clear and illuminating explanation of Deleuze and Guattari’s use of Paris’s work in chapter 3, “Faces,” in his Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts (New York: Routledge, 2003), 79–110. Deleuze and Guattari, chap. 7, “Year Zero—Faciality,” in Thousand Plateaus. 25. A most famous instance not mentioned by Paris is of course Magritte’s The Rape of 1934. An early modern instance Paris mentions is the Allegory by a follower of Titian (National Gallery, London). 26. Millard Meiss, Giotto and Assisi (New York: New York University Press, 1960). 27. On faciality in early modern art, see Maria M. Loh, “Renaissance Faciality,” Oxford Art Journal 32, no. 3 (2009): 341–63. See also Andrew Benjamin, Mark Howard, and Christopher Townsend, eds., “Face,” special issue, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 16, no. 1 (March 2011). 28. Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 96. 29. Foucault, Birth of the Clinic, chap. 1. 30. Jacques-Alain Miller, “Extimacy,” in Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure and Society, ed. Mark Bracher et al. (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 74–87. See also Linda Belau, “Trauma, Repetition and the Hermeneutics of Psychoanalysis,” in Topologies of Trauma: Essays on the Limits of Knowledge and Memory, ed. L. Belau and P. Ramadanovic (Washington, DC: Other, 2002); Johan Schokker and Tim Schokker, Extimiteit: Lacan’s Terugkeer naar Freud (Amsterdam: Boom, 2000). 31. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Uncanny, trans. David Mclintock (orig. 1919; London: Penguin, 2003), 121–62. 32. See also Rosalind Krauss, “The Uncanny,” in Formless: A Userʼs Guide, ed. Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois (New York: Zone Books, 1997). 33. Lacan, Écrits, 172, quoted in Miller, “Extimacy,” 77. 34. Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 71. 35. Copjec, Read My Desire, 129. 36. Freud, “Uncanny,” 161–62. 37. Wajcman, Fenêtre. 38. Quoted in ibid., 428. 39. For a brilliant problematization of the notion of tableau, see Victor Stoichita’s unrivalled The Self-Aware Image: An Insight in Early Modern Meta-painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), especially the introduction. 40. On the notion of privacy, see also Beate Rössler, “Privacies: An Overview,” in Privacies: Philosophical Evaluations, ed. B. Rössler (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004).

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41. Wajcman, Fenêtre, 428–70. Two parts of his book have been translated in English by Barbara P. Fulks as “The Birth of the Intimate,” pts. 1 and 2, Lacanian Ink 23 (Summer/Fall 2004) and 24/25 (Winter/Spring 2005) respectively. 42. Wajcman, Fenêtre, 418. 43. Ibid., 454. 44. Ibid., 455 (“Birth of the Intimate,” pt. 1, 47). 45. I have made this point in my Rhetoric of Perspective: Realism and Illusionism in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still Life and Trompe-l’Oeil Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), chap. 4. 46. Wolfgang Kemp, “Das Revolutionstheater des Jacques-Louis David: Ene neue Interpretation des ‘Schwurs im Ballhaus,’ ” Marburger Jahrbuch Für Kunstwissenschaft 21 (1986): 165–84. 47. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 3–37. 48. Mladen Dolar, “At First Sight,” in The Gaze and the Voice as Love Objects, ed. Renata Salecl and Slavoj Žižek (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 129. 49. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 1:472. Chapter Five 1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, or The New Heloise: Letters of Two Lovers Who Live in a Small Town at the Foot of the Alps, trans. Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College / University Press of New England, 1997), 403. 2. Remarkably, nothing is known about this small treasure. It is not mentioned in Annette Peach’s exhaustive list of Byron portraits, which, by the way, does include an early eye picture of Byron, rather clumsily done in pencil and watercolor. This eye portrait was displayed among other memorabilia at the exhibition “Mad, Bad and Dangerous: The Cult of Lord Byron” by Fiona MacCarthy at the National Portrait Gallery in 2002–3. 3. Peach, “Portraits of Byron,” 1–144, in particular 11–17; see also no. 6, p. 26. John Clubbe, Byron, Sully and the Power of Portraiture (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 195. 4. A copy of this 1814 portrait, done by Phillips himself in 1835, is in the National Portrait Gallery, London. 5. In other pictures, Byron’s eyes are alternately light blue or gray. 6. Augusta Leigh, January 19, 1816, cited in Malcombe Elwin, Lord Byron’s Wife (London: Macdonald, 1962), 356. See also Peach, “Portraits of Byron,” 14. 7. Peach, “Portraits of Byron,” 11. 8. Hester Stanhope, Memoirs of the Lady Hester Stanhope, ed. C. L. Meryon (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1985), 3:219. 9. Peach, “Portraits of Byron,” 14. 10. Newton Hanson, November 1818, Venice, in George Gordon, Lord Byron, Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap / Harvard University Press, 1973–82), 4:266–67n. See also Peach, “Portraits of Byron,” 14. 11. Caroline Lamb, “The Whole Disgraceful Truth”: Selected Letters of Lady Caroline Lamb, ed. Paul Douglass (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 114–15. 12. Peach gives a selective summary of what contemporaries thought of Byron in her phenomenal “Portraits of Byron.” 13. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed.

notes to pages 154–164 ¦ 195

Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), 4:636, 641. 14. Caroline Lamb, Glenarvon, ed. Deborah Lutz (Kansas City, MO: Valancourt Books, 2007), 145. All page numbers refer to this edition. 15. Dolar, “At First Sight,” 134. 16. In light of Lamb’s account of how jewelry may be actual shackles, Anne Mee’s portrait miniature of Frances Julia, Duchess of Northumberland (1752–1820), which shows the sitter wearing jewels that weigh heavily on the body, may suggest a sense of domination (1779, Alnwick Castle, Northumberland). Mee painted the small image in the year of the sitter’s marriage to Hugh Percy, second Duke of Northumberland. Frances Julia is clad in what appears to be black velvet and is covered by a dark veil against which her quite elaborate set of pearl strings are set. The set consists of a headpiece, two-string short and three-string long necklaces with heavy hangers, and a pair of earrings. The combination of the individual items gives an impression of excess. Admittedly, the Duke of Northumberland was one of the richest men of his time; however, this ostentatious display of bejeweled chains, largely against thencurrent aristocratic taste, which generally favored more sober pictures, has been put in a bleak light by Lamb’s equation between the gaze, bondage, and the chain. Frances Julia suddenly looks weighted down by her valuables rather than being proud of wearing them. Serving as both lure and leash, the ornaments seem to trace the zigzagging pathways of a captivating gaze. 17. For an elaboration on this contradiction, see Renata Salecl, “I Can’t Love You Unless I Give You Up,” in Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, ed. Salecl and Žižek, 179–207. 18. The Oxford English Dictionary states: “A drawing or painting of a person, often mounted and framed for display, esp. one of the face or head and shoulders; (also) an engraving, photograph, etc., in a similar style. (Now the usual sense.)” 19. Edouard Pommier, Théories du Portrait: De la Renaissance aux Lumière (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 14–30. 20. Louis Marin, “The King’s Body,” in Food for Thought, trans. Mette Hjort (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 189–242. 21. Peach, “Portraits of Byron,” cat. no. 6. 22. The eye at the Musée Carnavalet was almost certainly painted in the first decades of the nineteenth century, and is not one of the frequently appearing latenineteenth- or early-twentieth-century forgeries created when such trinkets were in great demand among connoisseurs. 23. Peach, “Portraits of Byron.” See also Clubbe, Byron, Sully, 195. Apparently Byron had phenomenal eyesight and was able to see details that people in his company often missed. 24. Nancy, “Look of the Portrait,” 220. 25. See chapter 4 above. 26. See the part on Riegl and attentiveness in the introduction. 27. Maurice Blanchot, “The Essential Solitude,” in The Space of Literature, ed. Ann Smock (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 32. Conclusion 1. Infatuated with her own beauty, the countess had various parts of her body photographed, among them her legs. In addition to shots taken from various angles and a painted photograph showing her legs up front, she commissioned a plaster cast of them. 2. Pierre Apraxine, ed., “La Divine Comtesse”: Photographs of the Countess de Casti-

196 ¦ notes to pages 165–177

glione (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 23. 3. The title Scherzo di Follia (Game of Madness), a reference to Verdi’s opera The Masked Ball, is written by hand on the margin’s negative; even without it, it would be obvious that the countess delighted in disguise. See ibid., cat. no. 78 (Scherzo di Follia) and 75 (The Eyes). 4. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “The Legs of the Countess,” October 39 (Winter 1986): 108. 5. Antoine Wiertz, “La photographie,” in Oeuvres litteraires (Paris, 1869), 309–10. Included in translation in Charles Harrison et al., ed. Art in Theory, 1815–1900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 645–55.

notes to pages 177–179 ¦ 197

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Index

Page numbers in italics denote illustrations. Plate numbers refer to color gallery. abolitionist medal, 62–63, 63, 69, 187n41 Absorption and Theatricality (Fried), 28 Addison, Joseph, 84 Adventures of a Bank-Note, The (Bridges), 85–86 Adventures of a Pincushion, The (Bridges), 85–86 Adventures of a Rupee, The (Scott), 85–86 Alberti, Leon Battista, 147, 153–54, 155, 157, 159, 167 anatomical marks, 138–39 anecdote: and methodology of text, 13–14; and structure of address, 28–30 apostrophe, 91, 101–4, 106–11 Arcadian Shepherds (Poussin), 105 Arendt, Hannah, 10–11, 12, 13 211

Art and Illusion (Gombrich), 146 “At First Sight” (Dolar), 165–66 attentiveness. See concern (attentiveness) of portrait for beholder attribution, difficulty of, 61, 187n40 Auge der Vorsehung, Das (Chodowiecki), 62–63, 64–65, 64 Auguste Amalia, Duchess von Leuchtenberg, 125–26, 128, 130, 134–35, 139, 140, 152, plate 18 Augustine, 11, 12–13, 151 autonomous portraits, 169, 170–71 Bachaumont, Louis Petit de, 185n14 Bachelard, Gaston: and co-location of architecture, furniture, and containers (subject-objects), 39, 40–42,

Bachelard, cont. 44, 158; and dialectics of open and closed, 44, 158, 160; and intimacy, 12, 13, 14, 40–41, 173; and narratives of exaggeration, 34; and poetic images as epistemological obstacle, 14, 39–40, 44; and vastness of miniature, 43, 173 Badura, Carolina, 61, 183n1 Bal, Mieke, 9, 92, 149, 182n14 Barthes, Roland, 88 Basil, Howard, 50 Batoni, Pompeo, 25–26, 33, 35, plate 4 Beckett, Samuel, 190n9 Being and Nothingness (Sartre), 157–58 Benedict, Barbara, 79, 80, 81, 87 Benjamin, Walter, 122, 160, 179 Benkard, Ernst, 120 Bentham, Jeremy, 129, 137, 138 Benveniste, Emile, 143 Berger, Harry, Jr., 13–14, 27–28, 29 Bergson, Henri, 40 Berlant, Lauren, 11–12 Bersani, Leo, 11, 12, 13 Bion, Wilfred, 133 Birth of the Clinic, The (Foucault), 148 Blanchot, Maurice, 5, 13, 177 blinking, 139–40 body: and the dead gaze, 91, 92–95, 111; detachment of the gaze from, 121; and deterioration of wax portraits, 114; gazing games and loss and/or invisibility of, 85–86, 87; intimate vision piercing through, 130–31; painting as erasing, 147, 149, 158; perspective and the disappearance of, 147; photography and portrayal of, 179–80. See also part-objects Boehn, Max von, 50 bondage, the gaze as, 165, 166–67, 196n16 Bowyer, Robert, 65, 66 Boy, the Son of Purser in the East India Company, A (Hayter), 32, plate 6 breast, part-objects and the, 131–33, 134, 136, 138–39, 142, 143–44, 151 breathing, by the eyes, 144–46, 157 Bridges, Thomas, 85 Bryson, Norman, 129–30, 146–50, 152, 158, 159 burgeon, as term, 87 Burlington Fine Arts Club exhibition, 60–61 Bust of Emperor Leopold II (Müller), 112, plate 16 Bust of Kaiser Ferdinand IV of Naples 212 ¦ index

(Müller), 112, 113, 114, 115, plate 15 Butler, Lady Eleanor, 49 buttons, 50–52, 51 Byron, Lord George Gordon: appearance of, 162–63; and Carnavalet eye portrait, 161–63, 167, 168, 172, 173, 195n2, 196n22, plate 21; devotion of lovers to portraits of, 32, 43, 128; eye color of, as unverifiable, 161–63, 164, 168, 195n5; eyesight of, 196n23; gaze of, 164–65, 167; Pigot eye portrait of, 167–68, plate 24; portraits of, 161–63, 167–68, 195n2, 195n4, 196n22, plate 22, plate 23 Caereri, Giovanni, 9 Caesar, Julius, 114 Camp of the Tartars, 49, 50 Castiglione, Countess de, 175–80, 176, 178, 196n1, 196–97n3 champs des Tartars au Palais Royal, Les (Opitz), 49, 50 Charlotte, Queen, 94, 184n18 Chinese Ming painting, 148 Chodowiecki, Daniel Nikolaus, 62–63, 64–65, 64 Christine von Schwarzburg-Sondershausen, Princess, 61 Clark, Kenneth, 142 Coke, Lady Mary, 94 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 164 collection of dresses of different nations, antient and modern . . . , A (Jeffreys), 78–79, 79 co-location/correlation of architecture, furniture, and containers, 13; Bachelard and, 39, 40–42, 44, 158; defined, 12; Fumerton and, 37–38, 39, 41, 42; as liminal zone, 39, 41; opening and closing and, 37–38; Stewart and, 38–39, 42–43 comedy, women as butt of jokes, 84 Comtesse de Castiglione (Pierson), 178, 179–80 concern (attentiveness) of portrait for beholder: and escape of self from exposure, 5; and the French regarder, meaning of, 172; and the gaze of eye portraits as plunging into the world, 173–74; Hegel and, 2, 3; Nancy and, 2–3, 4, 171–72; Riegl and, 2, 3, 4, 5, 181n2; and suitability of eye portraits for exploration, 6

Confessions (Rousseau), 97 Connolly, Lady Louisa, 33–34, 128 Coombs, Katherine, 8 Copjec, Joan, 136, 151, 160 Corinne (de Staël), 96 Corinthian Maid, The (Wright of Derby), 94 Cosway, Richard, 90, 188–89n65, plate 14; and apostrophe, 101–4, 102; enlarging eyes in portrait miniatures, 49–50, 185n6; eye portraits of the Prince of Wales and Mrs. Fitzherbert, 46–47, 46, 48, 60–61, 71–74, 81, 87, 166, 184–85n2, 188n60, plate 11; and origin of eye portraits, 48, 86–87 Countess Erdin (Anon.), 31–32, 31 Crary, Jonathan, 182n11 crying: bringing body to natural state, 95–96, 108; gender and, 96; as superior to language, 95, 108, 190n9. See also crying eye portraits; tears crying eye portraits, plate 12, plate 13; apostrophe and prosopopoeia and, 104, 106, 108–11; gift exchange and, 94–95, 98; inscriptions on, 90; materialized tears in, 108–9; performative tears, 91; and portrait miniatures distinguished from eye portraits, 90–91; Purvis eye portrait, 89–92, 96, 98, 104, 106, 108, 110–11, 121–23, plate 12; and rhetoric of tears, 98, 108; role of, in mourning, 90–91; settings of, 89–90. See also gaze of crying eye portraits; mourning Culler, Jonathan, 103 Cultural Aesthetics (Fumerton), 7–8, 36–38 cultural symptoms, 70–71, 86–87 curiosity: changing meaning of, 78–80, 79, 81; as gendered female, 81; merging with voyeurism, 87 Curiosity (Benedict), 79, 80, 81 “Curiosity” (Ripa), 78–80, 79 curtain as symbol, 155, 157–58, 171, plate 20 Curtius, Philippe, 117 Damisch, Hubert, 9 Dangerous Liaisons (Laclos), 30–31, 73 Darly, Mary and Matthew, 81–84, 83 David, Jacques-Louis, 155–57, 156

dead gaze: the body and, 91, 92–95, 111; of crying eye portraits, 90, 91–92, 111, 113; death masks and, 92, 117–21, 118, 122, 123; wax portraits and, 92, 112–17, 121, 160, 192n39, plate 15, plate 16 death, and disposal of artworks, 94, 189– 90n1. See also crying eye portraits; death masks; epitaphs; mourning Death Mask of Queen Louisa of Prussia (anon.), 117–18, 118, 120 death masks, gaze of, 92, 117–21, 118, 122, 123 Declaration of the Rights of Man, 63, 64, 68 decorum glass (jealousy glass), 79–80 d’Églantine, Fabre, 67, 187–88n49 Delany, Mrs., 94 Deleuze, Gilles, 135, 143, 144, 146 Delicate Distress, The (Griffith), 41–42 democratization of naturalism, 114–15 departure of the sitter’s gaze, 163–64, 168, 171–73 Depelsenaire, Yves, 152 Derby, Joseph Wright of, 94 Descartes, René, 39 detheatricalizing beholding, 28. See also fiction of the pose Dickens, Charles, 55 Dictionary (Johnson), 87 Diderot, Denis, 28, 97–98, 116–17, 141 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 113, 115 Dolar, Mladen, 165–66, 167, 172 Dombey and Son (Dickens), 55 Dowdeswell Gallery exhibition (1905), 59–60, 188n53 Duby, George, 153 Duchess d’Aumale, The (Ross), 57, 58, 59 Dürer, Albrecht, 167 Earlom, Richard, 60, 60, 77, 82, 84 Edward VII, 59 ego: and Klein’s depressive and paranoid-schizoid states, 193n7; and part-objects, 132, 133 Egyptian mythology, 63–64 Elegaic Sonnets (Smith), 109–10 Elizabeth I, 36–38, 66–67, 67, 78, 115 Elizabeth I, the Rainbow Portrait (Gheeraerts the Younger), 66–67, 67, 78 “Empathetic Vision” (Nelson), 190n2 Engleheart, George, 48–49, 53, 183n1, 183n5, 186n19, 187n40 Enlightenment, 39 index ¦ 213

epistemological obstacles, 14, 39–40, 43, 44 epistolary novel, 10, 86 epitaphs, Wordsworth on, 91, 99–101, 99–100, 104–6, 105, 109, 191n25 Erdin, Countess, 31–32, 31 espace et le regard, L’ (Paris), 143–46 Essays on Physiognomy (Lavater), 101–2, 103 “Essential Solitude, The” (Blanchot), 174 Et in Arcadia ego, 104–6 Ewige Antlitz, Das (“Undying Faces,” Benkard), 120 exclusive beholder of eye portraits: furnishings and, 59; and gaze of the eye portraits, 81, 154; and the Gaze vs. the Glance, 149–50; and gift exchange, 6, 47, 70; particularity of, 70; reproductions and, 59; and the self, watching of, 130, 154; and structure of address, 30–34. See also eye portraits exhibitions of eye portraits, 59–61, 188n53 extimacy, 11, 149, 150–52, 158–60, 164, 165–66, 169 eye as symbol: and abolition, 62–63, 63, 69, 187n41; all-seeing eye of God, 59, 62–64, 65, 69; of Enlightenment, 62, 63–64, 64, 68, 69, 156–57; eye miniature’s meaning as outside of, 17–18, 69–70, 188nn54–55; and the French Revolution, 62, 63, 64, 67–69, 187–88n49; of monarchs, portraits of, 65–67, 65–67, 188n55 Eye of Princess Charlotte, The (Jones), 53, 55 Eye Portrait of Feodora, Princess of Hohenlohe-Langenburg (1807–1872) (Ross), 57, 57 Eye Portrait of George, Prince of Wales (Cosway), 45–47, 46, 48 Eye Portrait of Lord Byron (Pigot), 167–68, plate 24 Eye Portrait of Mrs. Fitzherbert (Cosway), 47, 48, 60–61, 71–74, 81, 87, 166, 184–85n2, 188n60, plate 11 Eye Portrait of the Duchess d’Aumale (Ross), 57, 58 Eye Portrait of the Duke d’Aumale (Ross), 57, 58, 186n30 “Eye Portraits” (Martin), 49–50 eye portraits, plates 1–24; as agents, 135; as cropping of portraits, 6; as cul214 ¦ index

tural symptom, 70–71, 86–87; death and disposal of, 189–90n1; defined, 5; desire of, 9; and diminished space of vision, 43–44; discomfort with, 6, 7, 8–9; and the extimate, 149–50, 152, 159, 164; eyelines of, 18; as fashion, 18, 47, 48, 49–55, 61–62, 70–71, 72; individuality of, 17–18, plate 1, plate 2; inscriptions on, 22, 90, 130–31; lack of scholarship on, 5, 6, 7, 8; as lost in a look, 173; magic of, 43; media used in, 18, 19–20; mimetic vs. symbolic registers and, 72, 74–75; and modernity, 182n11; monocular vision and, 6, 47, 87, 122, 156; of a mother’s eye, 125–26, 192n3, plate 18; as no substitute for an absent loved one, 38; as nourishment and support, 128, 142–43, 152; and open and closed, dialectics of, 44; photography and, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180; portrait miniatures, as hyperintensified version of, 22–23, 43, 70, 180; portrait miniatures distinguished from, 43, 74–75, 90–91; as portrait vs. symbol, 88; as portraiture as genre, 163–64, 167–68, 173–74; as portrayal of loved one’s gaze, 74, 135; privacy and, 5, 18, 22; as revelation of the gaze, 155; revival of, Victorian, 55–61, 57–58; sitter’s gaze as subject matter of, 6; size and scale of, 18, 23, 59; and subject-object relationship, reversal of, 71, 74–75, 80, 87, 88, 152, 159–60, 164; as theoretical objects, 9, 92, 182n14; of two eyes, 53, 53, 186n20; as unique image in art history, 21, 22, 44, 69–70; as vanishing mediators, 70, 173, 180, 188n57; vanishing point collapsed with viewpoint, 157; as wedding rings, 45–47, 72, 73–74; as “zoom in” on a sitter’s attentive gaze, 6, 80. See also crying eye portraits; exclusive beholder of eye portraits; eyes; gaze of eye portraits; gift exchange of eye portraits; hair; intimate vision; jewelry, eye portraits as Eye Reflecting the Interior of the Theater of Besançon (Ledoux), 68–69 Eye Self-Portrait (von Kügelgen), 61, 61 eyeglasses: acceptance of ogling via, 77–80; and curiosity, 78–80; Darly

caricature involving, 81–84, 83; eye portrait gaze as, 130; jealousy glass (decorum glass), 79–80; names used for, 75, 81; settings of, compared to eye portraits, 75, 76, 80; and the Spectator, 86; surreptitious looking via, 75, 77, 77, 78 eyelid, the gaze and the, 139–40, 142, 160 “Eyes” (Williamson), 48 eyes: as breathing, 144–46, 157; cannot see itself, 136, 168; of death masks, 117–18; enlargement and spacing of, 49–50, 185n6; of eye portraits, in profile vs. frontal view, 21–22; in eye portraits, size of, 18, 23, 59; of fullsize portraits, 21; as life of the miniature, 113, 180; in sculpture, blank vs. colorful, 116, 117–18; as separate from gaze, 143; as support for the gaze, 137; in wax portraits, 112, 113, 116–17, 121. See also eye portraits faciality, 143–44, 145–46 fans, 77, 82 fascination, 7, 44, 177 Félibien, André, 167 Female Spectator, The, 85 Fenêtres (Wajcman), 13, 152–54 Fenichel, Otto, 133–34, 144 Ferdinand IV, 112, 113, 114, 115, plate 15 fiction of the pose, 26–30, 37 Fictions of the Pose (Berger), 27–28 Fitzgerald, Lady Pamela, 192–93n3 Fitzherbert, Mrs. Maria, 45–47, 48, 60–61, 71–74, 81, 87, 166, 184–85n2, 188n60, plate 11 Formless (Krauss), 134 Foskett, Daphne, 7, 187n40 Foucault, Michel: the gaze vs. glance, 129, 148; and models of vision, 182n11; panopticism and, 129, 137, 138, 147 Fragonard, Jean-Honoré, 50 Frances Julia, Duchess of Northumberland, 196n16 Frank, Robin Jaffee, 8 Frederick II the Great, 51–52, 52 free space (Riegl), 2, 4, 7, 12. See also intimate reflection Freemasonry, 64, 64, 156–57 French Revolution: eye as symbol of, 62, 63, 64, 67–69, 187–88n49; and relocation of artists to Britain, 52–53; and wax portraits, 115, 117

Freud, Sigmund: and the ego, 142; Fenichel and, 133; and intimacy, 11, 12–13; Klein and, 131; Lacan and, 136, 150; and repression, 131, 150; Schlosser and, 115; and the uncanny, 150, 151, 166–67 Fried, Michael, 28 Friedrich, Caspar David, 140–42 Fumerton, Patricia, 7–8, 36–38, 39, 41, 42, 163 Garber, Marjorie, 70 Gaze, Lacan and the: Bryson and, 129, 147–48, 149; defined as term, 136; and the gaze as part-object, 130, 136; the Glance and, 147–50, 158, 159; and the image-screen, playing with, 138, 148, 193n16; inward gaze upon the self as taming, 154; paintings as taming, 13, 138, 141; perspective as, 147; the subject as born through, 136–37; and visibility, 137–38 gaze, the, 13; Bentham and, 129; Blanchot and, 174; as bondage, 165, 166–67, 196n16; of Byron, 164–65, 167; clashes of, 165–66; departure of, 163–64, 168, 171–73; Dolar and, 165–66; exclusion of, from selfimage, 136; the eyelid and, 139–40, 142, 160; as fascination, 43; Fenichel and, 133–34; Foucault and, 129, 137, 138, 148, 182n11; and the French regard, meaning of, 3; Heidegger and, 92; as invisible to the self, 4; Lacan and, 136, 139; Nancy and, 2–3, 92, 163–64, 168, 171–73; as part-object, 133–35, 136, 159–60, 180; photography and, 175–78, 178; representation of, 168; Riegl and, 1–2, 181n2; Sartre and, 137–38; and specular image, lack of, 136, 168; withdrawn, 92, 120–21, 122–23, 164, 171. See also dead gaze; eyes; Gaze, Lacan and the; gaze of crying eye portraits; gaze of eye portraits; gazing games (social network of looking); voyeurism gaze of crying eye portraits: “dead” gaze, 90, 91–92, 111, 113; as empathic (looking “with”), 190n2; as looking “for” us (vs. looking “at”), 92, 110–11, 122–23, 190n2; “speaking” gaze, 91, 110–11, 122. See also crying eye portraits index ¦ 215

gaze of eye portraits: as active, 5, 38, 144–46, 180; capturing the gaze of the sitter (departing gaze), 164, 172–73; concern for beholder and, 6, 173–74, 180; and desire for something other than what it is given, 9; double function of, 47; exclusive beholder and, 81, 154; as eyeglass or camera, 130; as looking “for” us (vs. looking “at”), 2–4, 92, 110–11, 122–23, 190n2; as panoptic, 134; as part-object, 134–35, 159–60, 173; as projection “into” vs. “onto” the body, 130–31, 132–33; as protection against the gaze of the outside world, 126, 128–29, 180; as unblinking, 139–40; and watching of the self, 130, 152, 154; as wishing to speak, 9, 91. See also eye portraits; gaze of crying eye portraits gazing games (social network of looking): and body, loss and/or invisibility of, 85–86, 87; caricature of, 81–84, 83; crying eye portraits not part of, 90; eye portraits and acceptance of ogling, 80–81; eyeglasses and acceptance of ogling, 77–80; gaze as bondage and, 166–67; gender norms of, 84–85; and miniature portraits vs. eye portraits, 74–75; Pointon and, 8, 47, 74, 80; public and private spheres and, 73–74, 77–81, 79; spectatorship, 84–86; and subject-object relationship, reversal of, 48, 71, 80, 85 gender: and crying, 96; and curiosity, 81; eye portraits as reversing, 81; and gazing games, 84–85; and macaronis, 81–82, 86–87; and ogling, 77–78, 81; of sight, 88; wearing of eye portraits and, 72; wearing of miniature portraits and, 72; and wigs, 82; and women as butt of the joke, 84 George III, 45, 65, 66, 71–72, 184n18 George III (Bowyer), 65, 66 George (IV), Prince of Wales, 45–47, 46, 48, 71–74, 81, 87, 166 George Engleheart (Williamson), 48 Georgiana, Lady, Duchess of Devonshire, 46 Gheeraerts the Younger, Marcus, 66–67, 67 gigantic, the, 34–35 Gift, The (Mauss), 23 216 ¦ index

gift exchange: of hair devices, 22, 93–94; inscriptions indicating, 22; of portrait miniatures, 8, 22; tears and, 96–97, 98, 107–8. See also gift exchange of eye portraits gift exchange of eye portraits, 22; of crying eye portraits, 94–95; and exclusive beholder, 6, 47, 70; and gender norms, 81; initiating the fashion for eye portraits, 47; Victoria’s journal depicting, 56–57 “gift of tears,” 98 Giotto, 144–45, 145 Girl Crying over Her Dead Bird (Greuze), 97–98 Glance, the Gaze and the, 147–50, 158, 159 Glenarvon (Lamb), 165, 166–67, 196n16 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 9, 96; Werther iconography, 109–10, 110 Gombrich, Ernst, 64, 69, 129, 142, 146 Goya, Francisco, 185n15 Grand, Madame (Talleyrand), 50, 185n13, 187n40 gravestone epitaphs, 91, 99–101, 99–100, 104–6, 105, 109, 191n25 Greuze, Jean-Baptiste, 97–98, 177 Griffith, Elizabeth, 41–42 Group Portraiture of Holland, The (Riegl), 1–2 Guattari, Félix, 135, 143, 144, 146 Habermas, Jürgen, 9–10 hair: curls and sideburns in eye portraits, 17–18, 126, 161, plate 18, plate 21; devices made of, as mourning jewels, 92–95, 93, 95, 106–7, 107, 111, 190n8; locks of, with eye portraits, 21, 57; in mourning lockets, 99, 109; portrait miniatures and, 35, 74; and wax portraits, 112, 114 hairstyles. See wigs halo, 144 Hamilton, Lady, 72, 188–89n65, 189–90n1 Hamilton, Sir William, 94 haptic gaze, 4, 113 Hayter, Charles, 32, 183n1, 187n40, plate 6, plate 7 Haywood, Eliza, 85, 87 Hazlehurst, Thomas, 32–33, plate 8, plate 9 Hazlitt, William, 27, 29, 30 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 2–3, 70, 169, 172, 173, 180, 188n57 Heidegger, Martin, 92, 119–21, 122, 130

Herding, Klaus, 68, 69 Hilliard, Nicholas, 35, 113, 180 “History of Portraiture in Wax” (Schlosser), 92, 112–17, 121, 130 history painting, 2 Holland, Lady Augusta, 59, 186–87n33 Holly, Michael Ann, 122 Holmes, James, 162 houses of wax, 115 Iconologia (Ripa), 66, 68, 78 identity of portraiture, 169 image: defined by Heidegger, 119, 121; the gaze and, 119–20, 121, 122; as look, 120–21; safe distance from images, 112–14, 115–17; theory of, 7 impersonal narcissism, 11 individuality of eye portraits, 17–18, plate 1, plate 2 Ingres, Jean Auguste Dominique, 177 inside and outside: as dialectic, 13, 34, 160; painting and zone between, 130, 143; and part-objects, 132, 143; the scoptophilic instinct and, 133–34. See also extimacy; interiority; subject-object relationship interiority: as having no place, 13; intimate vision creating, 12; letter writing and, 10; as miniaturized in eye portraits, 173; portrait miniatures and, 35; withdrawal into, 171; as the world itself, 152–53, 172. See also inside and outside Intimacies (Phillips and Bersani), 11 intimacy: Arendt and, 10–11, 12, 13; Augustine and, 11, 12–13; Bachelard and, 12, 13, 14; Berlant on, 11–12; birth of, and appearance of indiscretion, 160; birth of oil painting coinciding with, 13, 153; Blanchot and, 13; defined as term in book, 10, 12–13; exhibition of, by portraits, 169–71, 170; as exterior power, 5; Freud and, 11, 12–13; Habermas on, 9–10; Kristeva and, 11, 12–13; Lacan and, 11, 13; Nancy and, 169–71, 170; Phillips and Bersani on, 11, 13; psychoanalysis and, 11, 12; as refuge, 12; rejection and establishment of, 151; Rousseau and Romantics and, 11, 12; and surrender to self, 5; Wajcman and, 13 intimate places, Bachelard and, 12, 13, 14 Intimate Portrait, The (Lloyd and Sloane), 8

intimate reflection: defined, 4; Riegl and, 1, 3, 4. See also intimate vision intimate space: created by eye portraits, 157–58; created by miniatures, 33–34, 39; and scale, 34; and unfolding of miniatures in space and time, 34, 39 intimate vision: as counterweight to linear perspective, 5; crying eye portraits and, 91; defined, 4–5, 23, 39; exploration of, eye portraits as suitable for, 5–6; and the extimate, 159–60; and images protecting the self from the Gaze, 130, 158–59, 180; indiscreet/obscene, 113; and intimate places, 12; and photography, 180; piercing through the body, 130–31; as private, 5, 12; as reciprocal, 6, 80; and watching of the self, 129 Invisible Spy, The (Haywood), 85 Isabey, Jean-Baptiste, 50, 183n1, 187n40 Isherwood, Robert, 49 I-you dichotomy, 101, 104–8 “Jealousie” (Ripa), 66–67, 68, 79–80 jealousy glass, 79–80. See also eyeglasses Jeffreys, Thomas, 78–79, 79 jewelry, as shackles, 166, 196n16 jewelry, eye portraits as: eyeglass settings as similar to, 75, 76, 80; mountings of, 18, 19–20, 75, 125–26, plate 18; wearing portraits on the body, 18, 21, 72, 126, 183n2. See also mourning jewels Johnson, Barbara, 106, 108 Jones, Charlotte, 53, 55 Josephine (queen of Sweden), 125–28, 127, 130, 134–35, 139–40, 142–43, 152, 192n1, plate 18 Josephine, Empress, 126 Juliana Maria, Queen of Denmark (1729– 1796) (Nilson), 65, 65, 188n55 Julie, or the New Heloise (Rousseau), 97 Kant, Emmanuel, 10, 119–20, 122, 142, 157, 171 Karl XIV Johann (king of Sweden), 126 Keman de Sélestat, Georges-Antoine, 52–53 Kemp, Wolfgang, 155–57 Klein, Melanie, 130, 131–35, 136, 138, 142, 143, 193n7 Kleist, Heinrich von, 140–42 index ¦ 217

Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 109 Kofman, Sarah, 122, 123, 130 Kornmeier, Uta, 192n39 Krauss, Rosalind, 134 Kristeva, Julia, 11, 12–13, 132 Kügelgen, Gerhard von, 61, 61, 183n1 Kunstwollen, 2 Lacan, Jacques: and attentiveness of paintings, 4; extimacy, 11, 149, 150–52, 158–60, 164, 165–66, 169; and the Other, 136–38, 150–51; and part-objects, 136, 138–39, 140, 149; and subject-object relationship, 137–38, 151. See also Gaze, Lacan and the Laclos, Pierre Choderlos de, 30–31, 73 Lamb, Lady Caroline, 163, 165, 166–67, 196n16 language: crying as superior to, 95, 108, 190n9; intimacy as term, appearance of, 153; painting logic similar to, 146–47 Late Roman Art Industry (Riegl), 4 Lavater, J. G., 101–2, 103 Lawrence, Sir Thomas, 162 Lebrun, Elisabeth Vigée, 21 Ledoux, C. N., 68–69 Leferre, Jean-Louis, 183n3 Leicester, Earl of, 36, 37 Leigh, Augusta, 162 Leonardo, 28 Leopold II, 112, plate 16 Letter to D’Alembert (Rousseau), 73 letters and letter writing: analogy of miniature portraits and, 23–30; and the interiority of the family, 10; portrait miniatures as, 26–34 linear perspective. See perspective Lloyd, Stephen, 8, 48 lockets, 35, 71, 72, 99, 109, 167–68 “Look of the Portrait, The” (Nancy), 2–3, 163–64, 169–73 looking. See gaze, the; vision lorgnette (jealousy glass), 79–80 lost in a look, painting as, 173 Lotte at Werther’s Tomb (Smith), 109, 110 Lotto, Lorenzo, 28, 29, 30, 37, 170–71, 170 Louisa (queen of Prussia), 53, 54, plate 17; death mask of, 117–18, 118, 120–21 Love and Loss (Frank), 8 loyalty, wearing of miniatures as, 71–72 macaronis, 81–82, 86–87 Mackenzie, Henry, 96–97, 98, 108, 109 218 ¦ index

Malbone, Edward, 61, 183n1, 187n39 Maldiney, Henri, 5 Man, Paul de, 191n25 Man of Feeling, The (Mackenzie), 96–97, 98, 108, 109 mantlepiece, eye portrait in, 59, 186–87n33 Margaret Cocks (Cosway), 101, 102 Margaret Cocks, Later Margaret Smith (Cosway), 90–91, plate 14 Marie Louise, Empress, 61, 114 Marin, Louis, 9, 167 Martin, Mary, 49–50 Martini, P. A., 75, 76 “Masked Imagination” (Nancy), 120 Maupassant, Guy de, 88 Mauss, Marcel, 23–24, 25 Medicus, Thomas, 113, 117 Mee, Anne, 75, 77, 196n16 Meiss, Millard, 144 melancholy of art history, 122–23 Melanie Klein (Kristeva), 132 Melville, Sir James, 36–38 Mémoires Secrets, 50–51, 185n14 Memoirs in Miniature (Williamson), 48 Memorial for S. C. Washington (Anon.), 99, 100 Memorial Ring in Memory of Cath Motley (Anon.), 99, 100, 101, 191n19 memory, intimate places as storage for, 12, 44 Menzel, Adolph, 51–52, 52 Mercier, Louis Sébastien, 78, 86 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 4, 144 Merritt, Juliette, 85 Meyer, Jeremy, 72 Michaux, Henri, 144 microhistory, 13–14 Miller, Jacques-Alain, 150–51, 152, 159 Miniature, The (Wheatley), 24, 24, 26 “Miniature Paintings of Eyes” (Williamson), 48 miniatures: on buttons, 50–51; theatricality of, 42, 74. See also portrait miniatures Mitchell, W. J. T., 9, 122 Monk by the Sea, The (Friedrich), 140–42 monocular vision, 6, 47, 87, 122, 137, 156 Montaigne, Michel de, 11 mother-and-child attunement, intimacy and, 11, 12 mother’s eye portraits, 125–26, 192n3, plate 18 mourning, proper expression of grief,

101–2, 102–3. See also mourning jewels; mourning pieces mourning jewels: epitaphs in, 99–101, 99–100, 104–5, 105; as fashion, 92; hair devices as, 92–95, 93, 95, 106–7, 107, 111, 190n8; numbers of eye portraits as, 90; portrait miniatures as, 92, 99–101, 99–100, 102, 104–5, 105, 106–8, 107, 111; Victorian revival of eye portraits as, 55–59, 57–58. See also crying eye portraits mourning pieces: apostrophe and, 91, 101–4, 106–11; portraits as, 90–91, plate 14; prosopopoeia and, 91, 104–6, 108–11, 190n25 Müller, Joseph, Graf Deym von Stritetz, 112, plate 15, plate 16

110, 191n25 On Longing (Stewart), 7–8, 34 one-eyed (monocular) vision, 6, 47, 87, 122, 137, 156 opening and closing: and co-location between architecture and miniatures, 37–38; eye portraits and dialectics of, 44; portrait miniatures and dynamics of, 37–38, 41–42 opera box. See theater Opitz, George Emanuel, 49, 50 Optic Curls, or the Obligeing Head Dress, The (Darly), 81–84, 83 optic gaze, 4 Other, the: Depelsenaire and, 153; Klein and, 132; Lacan and, 136–38, 150–51

Nachbild, 120, 121, 122 Nachleben, 55–56, 117, 122 Nancy, Jean-Luc: autonomous portraits, 169, 170–71; and being lost in a look, 173; and concern of portrait for beholder, 2–3, 4, 171–72; and death masks, 120–21, 122; and departure of the gaze, 163–64, 168, 171–73; the discrete and the image, 112–13; and the gaze, 2–3, 92, 163–64, 168, 171–73; and identity of portraiture, 169; and intimacy, exhibition of, 169–71, 170; and the sitter as self, 2–3; and the subject in portraiture, 169, 172, 173; and withdrawal of the gaze in death masks, 92, 120–21 naturalism, of wax portraits, 112–17, 192n39 Nelson, Lord, 72, 188–89n65, 189–90n1 Nelson, Robert, 190n2 Nemours, Duke of, 56 Nilson, J. E., 65, 65, 188n55 “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms” (Klein), 132–33

painting: birth of, coinciding with intimacy as concept, 13, 153; Bryson’s theory of, 129–30, 146–50, 152, 158, 159; dehistoricizing the viewer, 146, 147; and deixis, suppression of, 147; the Gaze as tamed by, 13, 138, 141; the Glance vs. the Gaze and, 147–50, 158, 159; Gombrich’s theory of, 129, 142, 146; intimacy as created by, 13; linear perspective and, 46–47; as lost in a look, 173; as shield, 158–59; space in, as structured by the gaze, 143–45; as unthreatening realm for our gaze, 157; as window, 153–54, 155, 158, 172. See also perspective Palladion (Frederick II the Great), 51–52, 52 Pamela (Richardson), 96 Panofsky, Erwin, 70, 105–6 panopticism, 129, 134, 137, 138, 147 Paris, Jean, 143–46 part-objects: Deleuze and Guattari and, 135; as extimate, 149, 151–52; eye portraits and, 134–35, 159–60, 173; the gaze as, 133–35, 136, 159–60, 180; ingestion and ejection and, 135; and introjection, 131, 132, 133–34; Klein and, 130, 131–35, 136, 138, 142, 143, 193n7; Lacan and, 136, 138–39, 140, 149; and love and hate, impulses of, 131–32, 133; and projection, 131, 132, 142–43; and projective indentification, 131, 132–33, 135, 143. See also psychoanalysis Peach, Annette, 168, 195n2

Oath in the Tennis Court (David), 155–57, 156 object narratives, 85–86 Ocular Family Portrait of Queen Louisa of Prussia and Four of Her Children (Anon.), 53, 54 ocularcentrism, 4, 39 “Ode to the West Wind” (Shelley), 101, 104, 106, 108 Odoni, Andrea, 26, 29, 37 “On Epitaphs” (Wordsworth), 104, 106,

index ¦ 219

perspective: the body denied by, 147, 158; extimacy and, 152–53; eye as outside the representation, 155; intimate vision as counterweight to, 5; and spectator, birth of, 153; transforming the subject into an object, 147; universalized beholder presupposed by, 5; vanishing point as fictional, 147; vanishing point fused with point of view, 155–57, 156; and voyeuristic gaze, birth of, 154 perspective-glass. See eyeglasses phallus, as part-object, 134, 136, 151 Phillips, Adam, 11, 12, 13 Phillips, Thomas, 162, 168, 195n4, plate 22 photography, 175–80, 176, 178, 196n1, 196–97n3 Pierson, Pierre-Louis, 175–80, 176, 178, 196n1, 196–97n3 Pigot, Elizabeth, 167–68, plate 24 Pliny, 155 poetic images, as epistemological obstacle, 14, 39–40, 44 Poetics of Space, The (Bachelard), 12, 34, 39–44 Pointon, Marcia: and analogy between letters and miniatures, 10, 22, 23–25; and autograph, portrait miniatures as, 33; and gazing games (social networks of looking), 8, 47, 74, 80; and tactility of portrait miniatures, 24, 25, 32; on wearing of miniatures, 188n62; and wigs, 82 Pontévia, Jean-Marie, 169 Portrait Miniature in England, The (Coombs), 8 portrait miniatures: as alive, 38; as autograph, 24, 33; as epistemological obstacles, 43; exhibitions of, 60, 60; eye portraits as hyperintensified kind of, 22–23, 43, 70, 180; eye portraits distinguished from, 43, 74–75, 90–91; eyeglasses appearing in, 75, 189n69; and gazing games (social networks of looking), 74–75; and gift exchange, 24–25, 26; the hand and, 34, 36, 42; and jewelry as shackles, 196n16; as letter, 26–34; letter analogy and, 23–30; as letter of introduction, 24; as marginalized subcategory of portraits, 163; within a miniature, 32–33, 35, 106, 107, 184n19, plate 9; as mourning 220 ¦ index

jewels, 92, 99–101, 99–100, 102, 104–5, 105, 106–8, 107, 111; and opening and closing, dynamics of, 37–38, 41–42; and the part and the whole, relationship of, 34–35, 38; photography and, 179–80; within a portrait, 24, 24, 25–26, 33, 74, 90, 126, 127, 185n15, plate 4, plate 14; and public vs. private, 22; scholarship on, development of, 7–8; as substitute for loved one, 38; tactility of, 24, 25, 32, 38; and two-way flow of “looks,” 139; as unfolding in space and time, 22, 34, 36, 42–43, 167; as vanishing mediator, 180. See also eye portraits; portrait miniatures, wearing of; portraits (full-size) portrait miniatures, wearing of, 32–33, 184n18, 185n13, plate 9; gender norms and, 72; as gesture of loyalty, 71–72; origin of, 188n62 Portrait of a Man (Hazlehurst), 32, plate 8 Portrait of a Man against a White Curtain (Lotto), 170–71, 170 Portrait of a Woman with Miniature of Her Husband (Hazlehurst), 32–33, plate 9 Portrait of Andrea Odoni (Lotto), 28, 29, 30, 37 Portrait of Lord Byron (Westall), 162, 168, plate 23 Portrait of Lord Byron in Albanian Costume (Phillips), 162, 168, 195n4, plate 22 Portrait of Queen Louisa of Prussia (VigéeLebrun), 120–21, plate 17 Portrait of Sir Sampson Gideon with Unidentified Friend (Batoni), 25–26, 33, 35, plate 4 Portrait of Wilhelm Johann Zoege von Mantueffel (von Kügelgen), 61, 61 portraits (full-size): audience during painting of, 27; autonomous, 169, 170–71; and buttons, 51; contradiction inherent in, 3; cropping of, eye portraits as, 6; death masks, 92, 117–21, 118, 122, 123; definitions of, 167, 169, 196n18; departure of the sitter’s gaze in, 163–64, 168, 171–73; eyes in, 21; the face as an eye in, 172; figure and ground of, 163–64, 169, 171, 172; foundational narrative of image-making, 94; and the gaze, representation of, 168; as genre, and eye portraits, 163–64,

167–68, 173–74; identity of, 169; and intimacy, exhibition of, 169–71, 170; miniatures as part of history of, 8; miniatures within, 24, 24, 25–26, 33, 74, 90, 126, 127, 185n15, plate 4, plate 14; of mourning, 90–91, plate 14; as past made present, 120–21; photographic, 178, 179, 180; preceded by death masks, 119, 121, 122–23; and the public sphere, 22; and subject-object relations, 1–3; wax, 92, 112–17, 121, 160, 192n39, plate 15, plate 16. See also concern (attentiveness) of portrait for beholder; eye portraits; portrait miniatures Posch, Leonard, 112 Poussin, Nicolas, 105 Prince of Wales (George IV), 45–47, 46, 48, 71–74, 81, 87, 166 Princess Sophia (Mee), 75, 77 privacy: as inherent to eye portrait experience, 5, 18, 22; intimacy as site of, 10–11, 157–58; intimate vision and, 5, 12; lack of information and, 21; letter writing and, 10. See also intimate places; public vs. private prosopopoeia, 91, 104–6, 108–11, 190n25 psychoanalysis: intimacy and, 11, 12; and nourishment, painting as, 142–43, 152; the Other, 132, 136–38, 150–53; and painting as taming the Gaze, 13, 138, 141; Phillips and Bersani and, 11; and portrait miniatures, 8. See also Gaze, Lacan and the; partobjects psychoanalytical aesthetics, 130, 152 psychosis, 136 public vs. private: and eye portraits, acceptance of ogling and, 81; and gazing games (social network of looking), 73–74, 77–81, 79; and intimacy, 9–10, 11, 13; and portraits vs. miniatures vs. eye portraits, 22–23, 35–36; and things that should be shown vs. things that should be hidden, 11. See also privacy Purvis, Thomas, eye portrait of, 89–92, 96, 98, 104, 106, 108, 110–11, 121–23, plate 12 Queen Josephine (Westin), 126, 127 quizzing glass. See eyeglasses Ramberg, H., 75, 76 Raoux, Jean, 41, plate 10

rattlesnake gaze, 164–65, 167 Read My Desire (Copjec), 136, 151, 160 Reading “Rembrandt”(Bal), 149 reality, and exclusion of the gaze from self-image, 136 “Reason of State” (Ripa), 66, 68 Redon, Odilon, 188n54 repression: Freud and, 131, 150; and inside and outside, logic of, 158; and the self, 131, 151 respiratory introjection, 133 Reynolds, Graham, 7 Reynolds, Joshua, 105 Richardson, Samuel, 96, 97 Richmond, Duchess of, 115 Riegl, Alois, 6; and alternative temporality, 114; and attentiveness (concern) of portrait for the beholder, 2, 3, 4, 5, 181n2; and free space, 2, 4, 7, 12, 171; and the gaze, 1–2, 181n2; and the haptic gaze, 4; and intimate reflection, 1, 3, 4; and “looking for” as term, 190n2; and subject-object relations, 2–3, 4 Ripa, Cesare, 66–67, 68, 69, 78–80 Robespierre, 67–68 Roman wax statues, 114 Romanticism: and the gaze as bondage, 167; intimacy and, 11, 12 Ross, Sir William, 56–59, 57–58 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 11, 12, 73, 97, 190n11 Rowlandson, Thomas, 73, 73, 77, 82 Royal Academy Exhibition (Richard Earlom, after Charles Brandoin), 60, 60, 77, 82, 84 Royal Academy Exhibition of 1787, The (Martini, after H. Ramberg), 75, 76 Sacco, Guiseppe, 186n25 Salons (Diderot), 97–98 Sanders, George, 162 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 137–38, 143, 158, 168, 171 Scherzo di Follia (Pierson), 175–78, 176, 196–97n3 Schlegel, Friedrich, 190n9 Schlosser, Julius von, 92, 112–17, 121, 130 Schmidt-Burkhardt, Astrit, 6, 48, 70, 188n54 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 116 “Scoptophilic Instinct and Identification” (Fenichel), 133–34 sculpture: death masks, 92, 117–21, 118, index ¦ 221

sculpture, cont. 122, 123; excessive intimacy of, 112; as unconcerned about audience, 2; wax portraits, 92, 112–17, 121, 160, 192n39, plate 15, plate 16; white vs. colorful, 116, 117–18 Secret Passion to Noble Fashion (Sumner and Walker), 8 seeing and being seen, 7, 88, 128–29, 130, 182n11. See also gazing games (social network of looking) Sehende Bilder (Schmidt-Burkhardt), 6, 48 self: intimacy and surrender to, 5; the sitter as, 2–3 self-image: and blinking, 139; exclusion of the gaze from, 136 self-portraits, 61, 61 Seminar XI (Lacan), 137–38, 147–48 Sennet, Richard, 37 sentimentality, cult of: mourning jewels and, 92, 94; and rhetoric of tears, 95–98, 190n9, 190n11, 190n15, 190n16, 191n18; and souvenirs, 7 sepia images, 92, 101, 103, 106 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 101, 104, 106, 108 Side Box at the Opera, The (Rowlandson), 73, 73, 77, 82 silhouettes, 94, 106, 107, 107, 191n32 Silverman, Kaja, 193n16 Sloane, Kim, 8 Smith, Charlotte Turner, 109–10 Smith, John Raphael, 109, 110, 183n5 snuffboxes, 75 social network of looking. See gazing games (social network of looking) Socrates, 11 Solomon-Godeau, Abigail, 177 “Sonnets Supposed to Be Written by Werther” (Smith), 109–10 Sorrows of Young Werther, The (Goethe), 96; iconography of, 109–10, 110 souvenirs, eye portraits as, 7 Soyer, Jean-Baptiste, 26–28, 29–30, plate 5 spectator, birth of, 153 Spectator, The, 84–85 Spencer, Lady, 71, 81 spy-glass. See eyeglasses St. Francis Giving His Cloak to a Beggar (Giotto), 144–45, 145 Staël, Madame de, 96 Starobinski, Jean, 9 Steele, Richard, 84 Stewart, Susan, 7–8; and desire of the 222 ¦ index

part for the whole, 38; and intimate spaces, 39; life within a life, of miniatures, 13, 14, 39, 41, 167; and magic of portrait miniatures, 35; and miniature as unfolding in space vs. time, 22, 34, 36, 42–43, 167; and narratives of exaggeration, 34–35; and theatricality of the miniature, 42, 74 Stokes, Adrian, 142–43, 152 Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The (Habermas), 9–10 structure of address: and “dead” gaze of crying eye portraits, 91–92; and epitaphs on gravestones, 91, 106; and exclusive beholder, 30–34; and fiction of the pose, 26–30; and intimacy, 171; and letter analogy to portrait miniatures, 23–30; and “speaking gaze,” 91 subject, the: birth of, 13, 136–37; Nancy on, and portraiture, 169, 172, 173 subjectivity: Elizabethan, 36–37; and letter writing, 10; modern, 37 subject-object relationship: and active vs. passive sides of the visual, 71, 88, 120, 129, 144–45; and contradiction inherent in portraits, 3; eye portraits and reversal of, 71, 74–75, 80, 87, 88, 152, 159–60, 164; Fried and, 28; and gaze as part-object, 135; gazing games and reversal of, 48, 71, 80, 85; and indiscretion of wax portraits, 113, 121, 130, 160; Klein and, 132; Lacan and, 137–38, 151; perspective and, 147; Riegl and, 2–3, 4; Sartre and, 137–38; Stokes and, 142–43; and theory of the image, 7 Sumner, Ann, 8 “ ‘Surrounded with Brilliants’ ” (Pointon), 23–24 surveillance: eye as symbol and, 65–66, 68, 69; Lacan and, 138; panopticonism, 129, 134, 137, 138, 147 symbol. See eye as symbol Symptoms of Culture (Garber), 70 Tableau de Paris (Mercier), 78 tactility, of portrait miniatures, 24, 25, 32, 38 Talleyrand, Charles-Maurice de, 50, 185n13 tears: as affects, 98, 190n16; economy of,

97; as gifts, 96–97, 98, 107–8; index of, 96; materialization of, 108–9; as orators, 98, 108, 191n18; pearls as symbol of, 90; readers/viewers weeping, 97–98, 190nn15–16; rhetoric of, 95–98, 190n9, 190n11, 190n15, 190n16, 191n18. See also crying; crying eye portraits temporality: alternative, and objects living on, 114; anachronistic, of death masks preceding portrait images, 119; apostrophe as reversing, 103–4, 110; denial of, and Western painting, 147 theater: the curtain, 155, plate 20; and eye as symbol, 68–69; and gift of tears, 98; and ogling, acceptance of, 77–78 theatricality of the miniature, 42, 74 theoretical objects, eye portraits as, 9, 92, 182n14 Thousand Plateaus, A (Deleuze and Guattari), 143 Tomkins, Silvan, 190n16 touch, gaze as, 4, 174 Treatise concerning the Arte of Limning (Hilliard), 35 trompe l’oeil, 155, 192n39 Tussaud, Madame, 117, 192n39 uncanny, the. See Unheimlich (the uncanny) Unheimlich (the uncanny), 150–51, 160, 166–67, 168, 179 Unknown Woman (Soyer), 26–28, 29–30, plate 5 Unknown Woman and Two Children (Hayter), 32, plate 7 vanishing mediators, 70, 173, 180, 188n57 vanishing point. See perspective Victoria, Queen, 55–57, 192n39 Victorian revival of eye portraits, 55–61, 57–58 Vigée-Lebrun, Elisabeth, 93–94, 120, plate 17 vision: empathic (looking “with”), 190n2; eye portraits looking “for” us (vs. looking “at”), 92, 110–11, 122–23, 190n2; modernity and, 182n11; superlative, 140–42. See also eyes Vision and Painting (Bryson), 129, 146 voice, as part-object, 136, 151

Voltaire, 98 Vorbild, 120, 121 voyeurism: birth of, 154; curiosity distinguished from, 78; as foundation, 137; gender-bending of macaronis and, 86; seeing in secret and, 154. See also gaze, the Wajcman, Gérard, 13, 130, 152–54, 157–60, 171, 172 Walker, Richard, 8 Walpole, Horace, 49, 52 Warburg, Aby, 115 watch fobs, 55, 56 Watts, G. F., 59 wax portraits, 92, 112–17, 121, 160, 192n39, plate 15, plate 16 Webster, Lady Frances, 32, 43, 128 Wedgwood, Joshua, 62, 69 Werther and Werther iconography, 96, 109–10, 110 Westall, Richard, 162, 168, plate 23 Westin, Fredric, 126, 127 Wheatley, Francis, 24, 24, 26, 74 Wiertz, Antoine, 179 wigs, 82–84, 83, 190n8 Williams, Alyn, 59–60, 188n53 Williamson, George Charles, 7, 48, 59, 71, 184–85n2, 188n53, 188n60, 188–89n65 Wilmot, Maria Eardley, 25, 26, plate 4 window, paintings as, 153–54, 155, 158, 172 Winnicott, D. W., 8 withdrawn gaze, 92, 120–21, 122–23, 164, 171 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 171 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 1–2 Wood, William, 183n1, 187n40 Wordsworth, William, 104, 106, 110, 191n25 Wright of Derby, Joseph, 94 Young Lady Reading a Letter (Raoux), 41, plate 10

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