Conversation piece

Conversation Piece ( rare: Conversation image ) is the name for a genre in painting and graphics, the socializing or people talking shows. As a genre of its own had conversation pieces in the 17th and 18th centuries in European art flourished.

Image object

Conversation Pieces combine socializing and conversations with various other motifs and genres, such as with musical performances, banquets or declarations of love; also may be the subject of the images board games and drinking. As milieus find private domesticity ( interiors), but also companies in the open or public places of social gatherings, such as in representations of people in the theater or in the coffee.

Conversation Pieces served the figure of interpersonal relationships and represent their respective views as well as the socially determined forms of life.

History

As courtly conversation gallant ( galante Entertainment ) the subject in Europe first appears on French tapestries of the 14th century and is then to be found mainly in the Venetian Renaissance painting, for example, in Giorgione's Concert ( c.1510 ). In the 17th century the conversation piece as specializing in reality figure painting on Civil living rooms into an independent genre, so for example with Jan Vermeer, Pieter de Hooch and Gerard Terborch was.

In the 18th century it continued mainly in French painting by, for example, in the fêtes galante Antoine Watteau and Jean- Honoré Fragonard, and learned, in particular with the motive of table conversation, in the 19th and 20th centuries, numerous variations, for example, in Menzel's round Table Frederick II at Sanssouci (1850 ) to Henri Matisse's family of the painter ( 1911).