Benjamin West；conversation( piece)

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conversation piece　話題となるもの, 話の種; （一家）団欒(らん)図 ((特に18世紀に流行した風俗画の一種)).

Featured Artwork of the Day: Benjamin West (American, 1738–1820) | Moses Shown the Promised Land | 1801 http://met.org/1AjIwQH

Overview

Eighteenth-century British painters used the word “conversation” to describe informal group portraits as well as imaginary views of daily life, now called genre scenes. In portraiture, conversation pieces referred to pictures commissioned by families or friends to portray them sharing common activities such as hunts, meals, or musical parties.

The inclusion of several figures “conversing” in familiar settings tends to make conversation pieces appear intricate and, therefore, small in scale. However, these intimate moods could be rendered in actual dimensions that are huge. Several full-length group portraits in the collection of the National Gallery of Art combine the charm of small conversation pieces with the formality of life-size likenesses in the Grand Manner.
Conversation pieces came into fashion during the 1720s, largely due to the influence of William Hogarth, Britain’s first native-born painter of international stature. Significantly, they arose at the same time as a new literary development, the novel. Not until the later 1700s did the British innovations of conversation pictures and fictional novels become common in other Western nations.
A large new middle class emerged as Britain’s colonial empire expanded and its Industrial Revolution began. Socially spurned by the aristocracy, these wealthy merchants, industrialists, and colonial landowners developed their own more natural and casual manners that made perfect themes to enliven both novels and group portraits.
Conversation pieces and novels, by fictionally portraying situations from real life, differ from the allegorical portraits and epic poetry preferred by the nobility. Prosperous middle-class people who normally commissioned conversation pieces are similar to the characters who populate such novels as Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, A Foundling, or Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

Timeline of Events in Georgian Britain: 1714-1830

1714	After Queen Anne dies without heirs, four German-descended kings named “George” rule Britain until 1830
1720	Daniel Defoe publishes Robinson Crusoe
1726	Jonathan Swift publishes Gulliver’s Travels
1728	John Gay premieres The Beggar's Opera
1732	Benjamin Franklin prints first Poor Richard’s Almanac in colonial Philadelphia
1742	George Frederick Handel premieres Messiah
1749	Henry Fielding publishes Tom Jones
1753	William Hogarth writes and illustrates aesthetic treatise, The Analysis of Beauty
1760	Benjamin West, first American artist to work abroad, sails to Rome
1769	Joshua Reynolds, as founding president, opens the Royal Academy of Art, London
	Patents awarded for James Watt’s steam engine and Richard Arkwright’s yarn-spinning frame
1774	Thomas Gainsborough moves his studio from Bath to London
1776	Declaration of Independence by thirteen American colonies
1777	Richard Brinsley Sheridan premieres comedy The School for Scandal
1778	Captain James Cook names Hawaiian islands after the Earl of Sandwich
1788	Sydney, Australia, founded as a penal colony
1792	West elected Royal Academy’s second president when Reynolds dies
1796	Edward Jenner inoculates against smallpox
1807	William Turner elected Royal Academy’s professor of perspective
1814	In War of 1812, British burn Washington, D.C.
1815	Duke of Wellington defeats Napoleon at Battle of Waterloo, Belgium
1818	Mary Shelley publishes Frankenstein
1819	John Keats equates truth and beauty in “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
1820	Thomas Lawrence elected Royal Academy’s president when West dies
1825	World’s first passenger railroad opens in England conversationalist, conversation piece Conservator Mark Aronson demonstrates the restoration of a painting by Benjamin West, revealing its hue, proper color, and spatial relationships. [with Yale Center for British Art] Restoration in Action: Revealing a Benjamin West Painting | Yale Center for British Art BRITISHART.YALE.EDU