The seventeenth- to the mid-nineteenth century paintings in “The Conversation Piece,” which are from the royal collection, show the fashionable at their ease, interacting with apparent naturalness. They are not formal portraits emphasizing rank and importance but the relaxed face of the great and sometimes good: “Look, we are just like you, if rather better.” The fashionably informal thus depicted range from wealthy but cheerful seventeenth-century Dutch merchants playing at being aristocrats to Johan Zoffany’s The Academicians of the Royal Academy, 1771–2, which depicts them pretending to be artists. All of the Academicians are there, grouped around a miserable scrawny nude male model, his privates tactfully hidden behind a raised knee, discussing how best to draw him. Poseurs looking at a poser. High above them on the wall are formal portraits of the two female founding academicians, Angelica Kauffman (1741–1807) and the flower painter Mary Moser (1744–1819). They could not possibly be present at such an indelicate scene and their images are placed where their imagined eyes can see only walls. Zoffany’s masterpiece is, in other respects, though, a vehicle for social inclusivity; the visiting Chinese artist Tan-Che-Qua is in there as one of the lads and Sir Joshua Reynolds, the President of the Academy, has insisted on being painted while using his huge ear trumpet to establish his handicapped status. Dr. Johnson was not amused, and, when Reynolds emphasized Johnson’s poor eyesight in his portrait, said robustly that he did not want to be remembered as
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Exhibition note
On “The Conversation Piece: Scenes of Fashionable Life” at The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London.
This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 28 Number 6, on page 48
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