Things - 29 January 2014 - Polite Things (to Talk About): Conversation Pieces

Dr Lawrence Klein (Faculty of History, University of Cambridge)Dr Kate Retford (History of Art, Birkbeck) AbstractsDr Lawrence KleinThe conversation piece and polite culture: images, things and the makers of things The genre of the conversation piece in eighteenth-century Britain brings to mind a complex but narrow world of ladies and gentlemen who sought to be represented as, in any number of ways, polite.In this paper, I will use conversation pieces to suggest ways in which others in this society (people who were neither landed nor especially affluent) gained access to elements of polite culture and may have incorporated these elements into the ways they saw themselves.I will do so in two principal ways.First, I will talk about visual components of conversation pieces that circulated in accessible forms: painted conversation pieces made reference to specific individuals, their appurtenances and their habits (even if this representation was highly inaccurate); these same