The Conversation Piece
The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, until 14 February
A visit to the Queen’s Gallery is always a civilised, enjoyable experience. Apart, that is, from the airport-style security to which the visitor is subjected — a saddening sign of the retrograde times we live in. The treasures of the Royal Collection are worth any number of visits (I always want to see Gainsborough’s ‘Diana and Actaeon’ or Annibale Carracci’s ‘Head of a Man in Profile’, but there are plenty of other fine things), while the temporary exhibitions mounted in the side galleries are very often of the highest quality. One such is the current display devoted to The Conversation Piece, and subtitled Scenes of Fashionable Life.
As a genre, the Conversation Piece derives from the earlier sacra conversazione, a representation of the Virgin and Child attended by saints or angels, popular in the Renaissance. Although the holy participants need not be actually conversing, the mood was usually one of shared meditation or contemplation. The Conversation Piece is a kind of lay equivalent, a small-scale informal group portrait, usually of a family or gathering of friends, which gained popularity in 18th-century England. In this exhibition the subject has been widened out from its specific frame of reference to provide an insight into the society and manners of a greater historical conspectus: from the time of Charles I to the reign of Queen Victoria.
The exhibition opens well with the little-known Hendrick Pot (1585–1657), a Dutch artist recorded as working in London in 1632. His painting here of Charles I, Henrietta Maria and Charles, Prince of Wales is so striking and memorable principally on account of the sumptuous expanses of crushed strawberry velvet covering the substantial distance between King and Queen. In this first room are also Pieter de Hooch’s ‘Music Party’ (1667), one of his interiors looking out, Godfried Schalken’s depiction of a strange parlour game called ‘Lady Come into the Garden’ (not as lewd as it sounds), and a very strange theatrical painting by Ludolf de Jongh. Entitled ‘A Formal Garden: Three Ladies Surprised by a Gentleman’, it hardly seems a Conversation Piece, looking like a scene from Peter Greenaway’s film The Draughtsman’s Contract, or something out of an embroidery.
The main room is dominated by the end wall on which are hung a big oval Gainsborough with a Hogarth on either side. The Gainsborough is a late work depicting Henry, Duke of Cumberland and his wife, with Lady Elizabeth Luttrell as a wistful onlooker and artist trying to capture the scene. It is wonderfully feathery and airy, the dense and encompassing foliage the reverse of claustrophobic, the frothy treatment of this sylvan scene recalling Watteau. Of the Hogarths, ‘The Popple Family’ (1730) on the right is the more interesting, despite compositional awkwardness.
Down the left wall is a substantial array of paintings by Johan Zoffany, generally held to be the greatest exponent of the Conversation Piece. I don’t usually like portraits of children, but Zoffany is so good at the carpet (and other furnishings) that his ‘George, Prince of Wales, and Frederick, later Duke of York, at Buckingham House’ is eminently palatable. Meanwhile, his double portrait of the Fleet Street optician ‘John Cuff and his Assistant’ is a marvel of character, still-life objects and the fall of light. I also like Zoffany’s great painting (unpopular when it was first unveiled, for including too many figures) ‘The Tribuna of the Uffizi’ (1772–7). An extraordinary work.
Different delights hang on the opposite wall. There is a lucid Stubbs of the Prince of Wales’s Phaeton, with a meaty Suffolk-faced coachman holding the horse on the left. The inclusion of Stubbs does rather take the Conversation Piece into new territory (two saddle horses chatting?), but the exhibition is the livelier for it. There are rather fine Landseers also, if you can appreciate the technical virtuosity without being choked by the sentiment. I particularly enjoyed the unfinished oil sketch of Queen Victoria on horseback. To accompany the show, there’s a handsome catalogue (£12.95 in paperback) written by Desmond Shawe-Taylor, Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, the first publication on the subject for more than 30 years, packed with information and 160 colour illustrations.
In a separate side room of the gallery is a ‘Picture in Focus’ display, currently devoted to Zoffany’s painting ‘The Academicians of the Royal Academy’ (1771–2). It depicts the members of the newly founded Royal Academy (not yet established in Piccadilly) setting up a life class in Old Somerset House, and it was painted for George III. A real gathering of the great and good in the art world of the day, it features perforce an all-male congregation in a grey and yellow lumber room furnished with both antique casts and live models. The Academicians are grouped round three sides of the room, leaving the central floor space strangely free, and appear to be engaged in earnest discussion of the values of ancient and modern art. They could just as well be gossiping, and probably some of them are.
One of the pleasures this picture offers is working out who is who — face-spotting, in other words. Reynolds, the Sandby brothers, Richard Wilson, Zoffany himself, Benjamin West, all are here along with many more, including the Chinese interloper Tan-che-qua, an artist who just happened to be visiting London at the time. Zoffany’s picture represents the life room, where artists drew from the model, though this assembly seems more intent on posing gallantly themselves than on making art. (Richard Cosway and Nathaniel Hone especially are striking attitudes to remember.) Around the walls of this side room in the Queen’s Gallery are hung five large life studies, all male nudes, to show the kind of thing that should emerge from a good art school. Ironically, a rare Hogarth drawing on blue paper is not very good anatomically; he’s had real trouble with the left arm. Guercino’s is one of the best, though there’s a beautiful red chalk figure by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. An excellent display.
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