Note 18 to Chapter 7 of the author's George Eliot and the Visual Arts, which Yale University Press published in 1979. It has been included in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
See Mario Praz, Conversation Pieces: A Survey of the Informal Group Portrait in Europe and America (London: Methuen, 1971). See also G. C. Williamson, English Conversation Pieces of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (London: B. T. Batsford, 1931); Sacheverell Sitwell, Conversation Pieces: A Survey of English Domestic Portraits and Their Painters (London: B. T. Batsford, 1936); Ralph Edwards, Early Conversation Pictures from the Middle Ages to about 1730: A Study in Origins (London: Country Life, 1954); and Edwards, "Georgian Conversation Pictures," Apollo, 105 (1977), 252-61.
Last modified 20 September 2000