The Conversation Piece
Scenes of Fashionable Life
First-class catalogue
Richard Dorment, Daily Telegraph
Paperback, 250 x 210 mm, 157 colour illustrations
ISBN 978 1 905686 07 0
The ‘Conversation Piece’ is an intriguing contradiction – the high-life group, but caught informally, off-guard. Popular in seventeenth-century Dutch painting, the genre was extended to include sporting events and ‘Grand Tourists’, and reached its apogee in the eighteenth century in the masterpieces created by Johann Zoffany for his English patrons, including George III.
This publication, the first on this subject for more than thirty years, provides a unique opportunity to connect the study of ‘the conversation’ in eighteenth-century English art to its seventeenth-century European predecessors.
Desmond Shawe-Taylor is Surveyor of The Queen's Pictures, Royal Collection Trust.
