In the early 1730s, small pictures with multiple figures, known as conversation pieces, came into vogue. Popular first among royalty and aristocratic families, the taste soon spread to the middling classes and remained popular into the nineteenth century. Charles Philips helped pioneer the conversation piece, and this example is his most ambitious. Here a group of courtiers take tea, most of them Whigs in opposition to George II’s government. The setting is the Earl of Harrington’s London house near St. James’s Palace.
Lord Harrington is, however, absent since he was on a diplomatic mission to Paris. Instead, he is represented vicariously by his room, decorated to the highest standards and latest fashions with still-life and ideal landscape paintings above the doors and fireplace, damask hangings, and a Turkish carpet. Strikingly, men and women converse together in apparent equality, and the artist has emphasized the similarities between the sitters, rather than their differences.
Text: Yale Center for British Art.
