Conversation piece [ Art & Luxury ]
… the places, practices and objects of sociability began to flourish, British portraitists started to offer a new mode of portraiture expressive of this culture. After a tentative start in the 1720s, the ‘conversation piece’ took off around … As the practices, objects and sites of sociability flourished in early eighteenth-century Britain, so a new mode of portraiture was developed to encapsulate them: the conversation piece. 1 Whilst this category became more capacious as the century progressed, and key characteristics of these portraits diffused through the genre of portraiture more broadly, this was a highly distinctive, immediately recognisable tradition when it emerged in the 1730s, …
Conversation | Painting | Portrait | Tea-table
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