The kind of pictures called a 'Conversation piece' has in this country come to be associated almost entirely with the eighteenth century, and has thus been arbitrarily divorced from its proper historical background. This neglect of the provenance of a distinct variety of European portraiture has, moreover, been prolonged by the facts that very little has been written about it, and that, in such literature as exists, the origins and development of "Conversations" are either ignored or misunderstood.

With this book, Mr Ralph Edwards repairs a surprising omission in the history of European portraiture. He has written a text, accompanied by a large number of illustrations, to show that the "Conversations" of Hogarth and his contemporaries, who introduced the vogue in England, are in fact relatively late examples of a type long popular on the Continent. He provides them with their ancestry, and shows from what modes and models of the Flemish, Italian, German, Dutch, French, and English schools they descend.

The case for a pedigree going back to the Middle Ages is convincing on the evidence of the illustrations alone. Mr Edwards' text lucidly expounds and analyses the evidence. Few are now likely to disagree with the finding that the "Conversation Piece", among the most attractive and characteristic expressions of the English temper in the eighteenth century, did not originate in that period as popularly supposed, but can legitimately lay claim to a long and august European descent.