The Duet

Arthur Devis's The Duet of 1749 depicts a musical domestic scene in the conversation piece format he made his own, showing two figures — probably a gentleman and a lady — engaged together at a musical instrument or with sheet music, an activity that signified both cultural refinement and the domestic harmony that propertied English families valued. Music-making was among the most respectable of polite accomplishments, and duet scenes implied both individual cultural attainment and the social grace of shared performance. Devis's figures have his characteristic doll-like precision of drawing, placed in a domestic interior rendered with care for its furnishings and scale. The Duet belongs to his middle period, when his formula was fully developed and his practice at its most commercially productive, serving the English gentry with images of themselves at their most gracefully cultivated.

Devis places his two figures in careful formal relationship, their poses creating a compositional dialogue appropriate to the musical duet they perform. The interior is rendered with the precise, somewhat linear handling that characterizes his work — furniture, costume, and space defined with equal attention. The palette is restrained and domestic, the light even and clear.