Note 11 to Chapter 8 of the author's George Eliot and the Visual Arts, which Yale University Press published in a 1979. It has been included in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
Herrmann, British Landscape Painting, p. 105. See also Ellis Waterhouse, Painting in Britain: 1530-1790 (London: Penguin, 1953), pp. 123, 125; Philip Mercier 1689-1760: An Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings (York: City Art Gallery, and London: Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood House, 1969), pp. 7, 15-16; Praz, Conversation Pieces, p. 125;and Paulson, Emblem and Expression, pp. 104, 123-25. Through Watteau's Flemish connections, this kind of group portrait can be traced back to seventeenth-century Flemish aristocratic conversation pieces by such painters as Gonzales Coques; see Staring, De Hollanders Thuis, p. 64.
Last modified 20 September 2000