In Custom and in Ceremony: The Meaning of the Conversation Piece

by: The Royal Collection

Edited version of the introductory essay from the exhibition catalogue - The Conversation Piece: Scenes of Fashionable Life by Desmond Shawe-Taylor

And may her bridegroom bring her to a house
Where all’s accustomed, ceremonious;
For arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares.
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?

(William Butler Yeats, A Prayer for my Daughter, 1919)
Conversation Piece at the Royal Lodge, Windsor by Sir James Gunn was commissioned in 1950 by the Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery (National Portrait Gallery, London). This is an unusual image of a reigning monarch in having nothing to distinguish King George VI from any other English gentleman sitting down to tea with his family (unless it be the strict profile view, reminding viewers of the coin of the realm). Although unusual, it was obviously appropriate: after a decade in which some foreign heads of state had been power-hungry, destructive and mad, how reassuring to see a British one so unassuming, kindly and obviously sane. The King appears to be discussing some matter with his family, with a cheerful seriousness. A beautiful historic interior is filled with light and fine things, without ostentation of wealth. This is a scene as English as rain.

Johan Zoffany, The Tribuna of the Uffizi, 1772-7
The Royal Collection (c) 2009, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

This type of painting is also peculiarly English; Gunn seeks deliberately to recreate the character of a Conversation Piece from the eighteenth century, like Johan Zoffany’s 1766 group portrait of the Willoughby de Broke family (J. Paul Getty Museum). Here is the same teatime ritual set in a similarly elegant and light-filled interior, with another indulgent father this time telling his younger son not to steal food from the table. The reference is clearly intended to remind viewers of the prosperity and exquisite taste of Georgian England and of the civilised ideals of the Age of Enlightenment.

The idea that the domestic circle, even when at play, has a sacred value can be traced back another hundred years. Godfried Schalcken’s Family Concert (The Royal Collection) of the late 1660s suggests that within a harmonious family the various generations succeed each other in a measured progression. A print of 1656 depicts William and Margaret Cavendish, monarchists living in exile in Antwerp. They sit in armchairs crowned with laurel wreaths and surrounded by their children and in-laws, like benign monarchs presiding over a council. The poem beneath makes the moral explicit:

Thus in this Semy-Circle, wher they Sitt,
Telling of Tales of pleasure and of witt,
Heer you may read without a Sinn or Crime.
And how more innocently pass your tyme.

Marcellus Laroon the Younger, A Dinner Party, 1725
The Royal Collection (c) 2009, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

Many seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish images of wealth or pleasure are intended to warn the viewer against extravagance, vanity and sin. As the century progressed throughout northern Europe (France, England and the Low Countries) moralists came more and more to accept that there was nothing intrinsically wrong with prosperity and fun, especially within a loving family. Molière’s play, Le Tartuffe, of 1664 shows a pious hypocrite nestling in the bosom of a fun-loving but essentially virtuous family. Joseph Addison (1672–1719) wrote in the Spectator (no. 494, 26 September 1712) attacking those whose ‘Superstitious Fears, and groundless Scruples, cut them off from the Pleasures of Conversation, and all those social Entertainments which are not only innocent but laudable’.

Johan Zoffany, Queen Charlotte with her Two Eldest Sons, c.1765
The Royal Collection (c) 2009, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

What makes fun innocent even virtuous? The answer is ceremony. This is the blessing for which Yeats prays in the lines from Prayer for my Daughter quoted above. Each of the works discussed so far has depicted a ceremony: afternoon tea, a family concert, a family circle, and family prayers; every scene has a quiet ceremonial dignity. It may seem strange to describe Gunn’s Conversation Piece as a ceremony when we consider that the artist could have depicted King George VI performing any number of ‘real’ ceremonies – investitures, Garter processions and the like – in full robes of state, rather than relaxing in civilian attire. Clearly there are two distinct types of ceremony.

Throughout the period covered by the exhibition the monarch performed an astonishing number of official ceremonies: christenings, marriages, coronations and funerals, through annual processions (Garter Day, Opening of Parliament) and birthday celebrations to regular investitures and, indeed, the routines of daily life. The arising of the King was called the levée, a ceremony invented by Louis XIV and widely imitated, though the word soon came to mean no more than a morning audience. Monarchs in the seventeenth-century regularly ate in public, a ceremony recreated by Bartholomeus van Bassen depicting Frederick, the exiled King of Bohemia, with his family seated at table served by a procession of gentlemen wearing swords, while other courtiers form an attentive ring behind their chairs. The members of the greater kingdom are held back in a public viewing gallery. Kings at this time lived their lives in public; their palaces were places of fashionable resort: according to Pierre-Jean Grosley, who visited London in 1765, the King’s palace ‘is open to every Englishman’.