Conversation piece

The conversation piece is a type of informal, small-scale group portrait depicting several people — most often members of a single family, sometimes friends or acquaintances — in a domestic interior, drawing room or garden. The figures are usually absorbed in some relaxed activity: conversation, taking tea, making music, playing a game or strolling, which gave the genre its name. Unlike the formal state portrait, the conversation piece seeks to convey natural behaviour, the privacy of domestic life and the social bonds between the sitters. The genre flourished especially in England in the eighteenth century, when the prosperous gentry and bourgeoisie wished to commemorate their status, possessions and family ties in an intimate rather than pompous form. Leading masters of the conversation piece were William Hogarth, as well as Arthur Devis, Johann Zoffany and the young Thomas Gainsborough. Such paintings are a valuable source for historians, since they record in detail the interiors, costumes, furniture, manners and pastimes of the age. The conversation piece reflected a new bourgeois culture of privacy and family values, becoming a characteristic phenomenon of English art in the Age of Enlightenment.