Conversation piece [ Art & Luxury ]
… 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 1730, thanks to … Retford, The Conversation Piece: Making Modern Art in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017). The arrival of the conversation piece can be charted effectively through the writings of George Vertue, … see Elizabeth Einberg, William Hogarth: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016), p. 53-6, cat. 20. Having started the painting in 1728, he described it in a list of pictures on which he …
Conversation | Painting | Portrait | Tea-table
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