For eighteenth-century British painters, one of the most important consequences of the nation's growing prosperity, fueled by empire and industry, was the creation of new modes of art. Prominent among these new genres was the conversation piece: pictures of convivial groups of people, often recognizable individuals, painted on a relatively small scale but with abundant detail. Despite the importance of this format to both the cultural history of the period and the careers of artists such as William Hogarth, no modern scholarly monograph existed until now. Kate Retford's magisterial The Conversation Piece therefore fills a major gap in the existing literature.

Previous to the publication of this book, the standard reference remained Sacheverell Sitwell's 1936 Conversation Pieces: A Survey of English Domestic Portraits and Their Painters. More recently, feminist scholars have brought fresh insights to the genre; highlights include an important essay by Shearer West (“The Public Nature of Private Life: The Conversation Piece and the Fragmented Family,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 18, no. 2 [1995]: 153–72) and a foundational chapter on patriarchy and inheritance in Marcia Pointon's Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (1998). But, as Retford rightly observes in her introduction, the field was still lacking a comprehensive survey. That lack has now been amply redressed, in a book that combines lucid, lively text with copious illustrations, featuring 235 plates, 180 of which are in color.

Particularly impressive is the book's structure. By taking a thematic approach, Retford combines the scope of a survey with in-depth analysis of specific case studies. The latter is especially important given the complexity of these images: these multi-figure narratives often commemorate (or paper over) the sitters’ specific social circumstances, using a wealth of props, supporting characters, and visual in-jokes. Each of the major figures in the field—such as William Hogarth, Arthur Devis, and Johan Zoffany—gets his due, without turning the book into a chronological march or a string of artist's biographies.

The first part of the book situates the genre in mid-eighteenth-century culture. Chapter 1 traces its origins in the convivial atmosphere of artistic clubs and then explores the relationship between this novel mode, focused on the present day, and the traditional hierarchy of genres, which favored history painting. Chapter 2 considers themes of talk and performance, with Retford arguing persuasively that these figures are not stiff or awkward, as is often said, but rather deliberately, performatively polite. The final chapter in this part engages “conversation” in its broadest contemporaneous sense, meaning a specific community or way of life. It considers settings beyond England, pairing Johan Zoffany's Indian scenes with David Allan's Scottish ones. This comparative approach is potentially fruitful, allowing for consideration of multiple sites within and without the British Isles, but the conversation pieces set in India get short shrift, especially in contrast to the detailed discussion of the relationship between the Scottish elite and England in this moment.

The second part considers settings: chapter 4, on outdoor scenes, links conversation pieces to country house views, estate management, and garden design; chapter 5, on indoor scenes, tackles the thorny question of the relationship between these works and actual historic spaces and furnishings. In this standout analysis, Retford demonstrates that the interiors represented ran the gamut, from generic settings reused for multiple clients to detailed (but not always faithful) renditions of specific spaces.

The final part turns to the figures themselves. Chapter 6 examines images of families, arguing that the genre proved especially useful for depicting extended kinship networks; this chapter also considers the role of servants as members of the household. In chapter 7 Retford analyzes group portraits commemorating male friendship, rejecting the binary of polite/impolite and instead stressing the commonalities among scenes of homosocial bonding, be they focal activity art or imbibing. The final chapter considers the humorous incidents that so often animate these canvases, from the comedy of misbehaving children and dogs to the cruel practical jokes of elite men.

In each of these chapters, Retford takes the opportunity to push back against some cherished myths about conversation pieces: that they are quintessentially English, essentially bourgeois, and quaint relics of a bygone era. Instead, she argues, these are modern images, in the sense of being very much of their moment. She also refutes the persistent idea that this is a middle-class genre: rather, “a key reason for the success of the conversation piece in eighteenth-century Britain was less its connection with this newly powerful social fraction than its ability to serve a wide variety of groups and concerns” (11).

The only flaw in this otherwise excellent book, and it is a serious one, is in its treatment of empire and of representations of non-Britons, especially people of African descent. For the majority of the book their presence is ignored, or their actions in a picture are described without any mention of their social significance. This issue is touched on only in chapter 6, in the section on representations of domestic servants. Most servants seen in conversation pieces, Retford convincingly argues, are anonymous signs of the sitters’ rank, “typically closer in status to the tea-kettles that they carry from kitchens … than they are to the other figures” (245). But the brief discussion of “black servants” omits a crucial fact: many of the people of African descent living in England were enslaved (246). They are literally property, not just akin to it. In a book otherwise so attentive to issues of social status, this is surprising omission. In general, this text only glances at the essential role images of non-Britons played in conceptions of national character, as shown in works such as Lynn Festa's Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (2006); Geoff Quilley's Empire to Nation: Art, History and the Visualization of Maritime Britain, 1768–1829 (2011); and Catherine Molineux's Faces of Perfect Ebony: Encountering Atlantic Slavery in Imperial Britain (2012).

Overall, however, The Conversation Piece is a landmark publication. It advances compelling new arguments about a major element of eighteenth-century artistic production and will surely prove both an essential reference text and an inspiration for future scholarship.