Portraying Politeness: The Early Georgian Conversation Piece and Its Patrons

Conversation pieces—small-scale, informal group portraits of family or friends—were produced in large numbers in England from 1730 onward. This article examines the Georgian conversation piece in terms of a social and economic analysis of the patrons' backgrounds and investigates why twentieth-century scholars misconstrued the social significance of those pictures. While certain aspects of the genre, particularly its small scale, seem to embody the values of the middle class, a systematic study of the early English conversation piece reveals that this type of portrait was principally commissioned by the elite of Georgian society to document their elevated status. The interpretation of the conversation piece as an art of the middle class was largely due to the research trend in history of a rising middle class popular in the early twentieth century.