Painting of the Day: The Duet by Arthur Devis, 1749



The Duet
Arthur Devis, 1749
The Victoria & Albert Museum

 From about 1730, group portraits reached a new popularity in Great Britain. Families commissioned painters to create fashionable portraits of couples or entire groups of beloved friends and family engaged in cultural activities. Among the most popular subjects of such portraits were families in or outside their own homes. This allowed a family to show off their possessions, civility, social rank and way of life. These kinds of paintings were typically considered “conversation pieces” and depicted groups taking tea, playing cards, and music in monumental settings.

These settings often did not represent real interiors. Painters such as the celebrated portrait artist Arthur Devis tended to show these interiors as grand and sparsely furnished. Take this portrait from 1749, for example which shows a couple in a grand interior. The scene is clearly fanciful, but the detail of the paintings on the walls and the view of the park through the fashionable Venetian window suggest that the background is probably based on a real house. Devis shows us an unknown couple of evident social standing. The woman is shown seated at a harpsichord while her companion hands her sheet music. Such a scene implies wealth, culture, taste, harmony, and leisure.

Devis was famous for informal portraits such as this. Devis' customers tended to be of the class of wealthy landowners as opposed to titled nobility.