If you are not sure what a conversation piece is, imagine some old-fashioned version of a Hello! photoshoot. This genre of historical painting — its name is taken from a now obsolete sense of the word “conversation” as in “the action of living or having one’s being in a place or among persons” — presents a group portrait of sitters in their domestic surroundings. They are supposed to look natural, even to give the impression that they have been caught off guard. And, as we observe them relaxing among their lavish soft furnishings, playing with their children and pets or pursuing country sports, we are looking less at descriptions of a series of individuals than at records of their various social interactions. The conversation piece is a portrait of a person’s place in the world.

These artfully composed pictures in which the rich and the fashionable of bygone centuries invite us into their lovely homes are far from the haughty court portraits that a Buckingham Palace venue might more usually suggest. However, the latest exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery cannot even begin to present an in-depth exploration of this rich genre. Dipping into the Royal Collection, it draws together a motley assemblage of three dozen canvases from the 18th and 19th centuries to present an introduction to these riveting works.

At the heart of the exhibition, in a dedicated “picture-in-focus” gallery, are some remarkable works by the German-born Johan Zoffany, a founder member of the Royal Academy who, along with Hogarth, was arguably the greatest British exponent of the genre. If nothing else this show suggests how mistaken Tate Britain was to abandon plans for a 2010 bicentennial exhibition of Zoffany’s work on the ground that there would not be enough public interest. Fortunately, the Royal Academy is planning to take up the discarded challenge instead, though we will probably have to wait for a few years.

But, bar the fine Zoffany canvases, a Gainsborough so gauzily painted that you can almost hear the woman’s dress rustle as she walks, and a couple of typically attentive Landseer pictures, several of the works in this show are of a markedly inferior calibre. Some present what seems to be little more than a picture of posed costume dollies. Hogarth is represented only by a stilted early painting and a sketch. And though fine pieces by Stubbs are included, his sleek equestrian subjects feel rather as if they have been shoe-horned into the show. Strictly speaking they are not conversation pieces at all.

This show follows the chronological development of the conversation piece, if not from its earliest beginnings with such masters as Holbein then from the 17th-century Netherlandish painters who made it so popular. Their style of work, admired and commissioned by Charles I, became fashionable among British artists. The conversation piece flourished in 18th-century England and became a significant genre in Queen Victoria’s reign when it posited family values as a desirable ideal.

An exhibition that begins in the domestic domain of stolid Dutch burghers and boastful merchants — with an exuberant garden ambush and a saucy parlour game picture thrown in to catch the eye — moves on to reach its apogee in 18thcentury Britain. Here is the highlight of the show: the intricate and astoundingly detailed confusion of Zoffany’s The Tribune of the Uffizi. This incredible work, portraying an animated gathering of argumentative aristocrats, artists and Grand Tourists in the famous hexagonal room in which the Grand Duke of Tuscany’s great collection of Old Masters was hung, took Zoffany five laborious years to complete. Then Queen Charlotte, who commissioned it, hated it and would not let it be hung. But it is worth visiting this exhibition to see it alone, not least when Zoffany’s lively portrait of Royal Academicians in a life drawing class is also on display.

The conversation piece is far from the snapshot portrayal that it pretends to be as it freezes its subjects in the midst of their expository attitudes. These are carefully manipulated images. At a fundamental level they are about showing off. They parade properties and possessions in a world in which children are symbols of genetic posterity and grand houses and gardens a claim to social power. Everything is perfect in the air-brushed beau-monde of these sitters. English painters looked to the Dutch Masters of the domestic interior, learning the importance of attention to detail and texture and dramatic light.

These canvases can provide a wealth of information about fashions and interior decorations; about customs and manners and tastes and lifestyles. A picture of 18th-century strollers in St James’s Park is hardly a masterpiece, but it is fascinating for the people-watching. The artist records everything from the flirtatious courtiers through the chatting soldiers or the promenading church patriarchs to the woman who reties her garter or the man who takes a pee.

Everything has a meaning. An accompanying catalogue points to them clearly, from the rebellious significance of sporting tartan after the Battle of Culloden to the propaganda message of Landseer’s intimate paintings of Victoria, in which a wholesome, loving family is posited as a model for state.

Nothing should be taken at face value in a conversation piece, not even by the subjects — the artists sometimes sneaked in their own satirical points. This is a show to provoke conversations among its viewers.

The Conversation Piece: Scenes of Fashionable Life is at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace (020-7766 7301; www.royalcollection.org) to Feb 14

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