Talk show

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.