John, Fourteenth Lord Willoughby de Broke, and His Family

The conversation piece — an informal portrait of a family going about its ordinary life at home — was a genre England invented in the eighteenth century, and no one practised it with more affectionate precision than Johann Zoffany, a German-born painter who settled in London and became one of the founding members of the Royal Academy. This example gathers John Peyto-Verney, fourteenth Lord Willoughby de Broke, his wife Lady Louisa North and three of their children around a tea table, one son hauling in a toy horse and another reaching for bread while his father raises a hand in mock reproof. The room’s very plainness is deliberate: the museum reads the olive-drab walls and worn carpet as a statement of position, the confident informality of an ancient titled family rather than the display of a newcomer. Zoffany fills the picture with the ordinary furniture of Georgian life — the porcelain service, the polished silver, the landscape over the mantel — and in doing so leaves one of the most exact records we have of how such a household actually lived. The painting is held in the J. Paul Getty Museum.