The Conversation piece
‘The Reading From Moliere’ is an example of an eighteenth century conversation piece. The conversation piece was a type of painting that was popular in the eighteenth century. It depicted people from the upper classes having conversations. These paintings depicted an idealised version of reality that emphasised the type of communication that was expected of polite society.
The aforementioned painting depicts a group of young people collectively enjoying poetry. This staged picture of young members of high society behaving in the correct and proper way seems slightly ridiculous when looked at through modern eyes, but does that mean that there is no modern equivalent of this kind of imagery and the ideas it represents?
’The Reading From Moliere’ Jean-Francoise de Troy, 1730
Flash forward to the modern day and this type of imagery is still commonplace, most often in the pictures that decorate university brochures. These images showing young people (presumably students) sitting around on the grass enjoying each others company are similar in that they depict an idealised version of young life and the way young people communicate with each other. I would hazard a guess, for example, that the implication in this picture is that the young woman in the light blue top on the left of the picture is sharing some sort of university related research material with the checked shirted young man sitting next to her and probably not sharing a snuff movie that she’s just found on the dark web. This puts across certain ideas about what type of lifestyle a person can expect when attending university. A lifestyle where everyone has lots and lots of friends and studying is done together as a sort of fun social activity.
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