wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
Alfred Sisley painted this winter scene in the small village of Marly-le-Roi in early 1875, soon after he moved there. Around 18 kilometres west of the centre of Paris, Marly-le-Roi was the site of the Château de Marly, which had been built for Louis XIV, King of France, in the late seventeenth century. Intended to be a retreat from the more formal court at Versailles, the château was known for its grand water gardens, which included fountains, cascades and a series of terraced pools that reflected the royal buildings. The gardens were maintained by water pumped from the Seine via an aqueduct which filled reservoirs in the park at Marly.

Although the château was demolished after the Revolution in 1789, traces of the area’s royal history remained. Since the beginning of the 1870s, Sisley had been interested in sites with vestiges of the Ancien Régime ('old regime') of pre-Revolutionary France. Several of his paintings around Marly-le-Roi included the pumping station (restored in the 1850s) and remains of the aqueduct. In Marly itself, he often painted the watering place for horses, one of the last remnants of the royal water garden, which functioned as an overflow at the edge of the park. Sisley's house was very close by, and during the two years he lived in the village he painted almost 20 pictures that show this watering place, including several snow scenes from 1875. These paintings might be regarded as an informal series, as Sisley focused on the same subject seen from different viewpoints and under different conditions.

In this picture we are looking southeast from the place de l’Abreuvoir, close to Sisley’s house at 2 avenue de l'Abreuvoir. The watering place is in the foreground, its surface frozen except for a dark area to the right where water pours in from an outlet. Just beyond the pool is the buttressed boundary wall of the park on the left and an unpaved road heading south up the hill to Louveciennes. The road gives a strong vertical emphasis to the picture and counterbalances the horizontals of the pool and stone wall. The pool itself is just one element of the picture, and Sisley is equally interested in the sky, the trees and the small houses that fill the landscape on the left.

Sisley very probably worked on the picture in one sitting: it looks as though it was painted rapidly. In many areas, the buff brown of the undercoat (ground) can still be seen. The paint itself has been applied thinly and the swift, almost rough, brushwork is clearly visible, particularly in the foreground. Having sketched in the composition using dark paint, Sisley built up the scene with lighter tones using only a limited range of colours, including a mauve-tinted blue and chrome yellow, as well as black and white. Detail has been added with further reworking directly into the wet paint. Tiny marks in the top left corner left by canvas pins used to separate wet paintings suggest the picture was painted outdoors and then carried home. A few colour highlights -- such as the dab of violet above the waterpump -- were added once the paint had dried.

Style: Impressionist
The wall of angular, jutting rock formations in this painting may represent a quarry, with the cuttings revealing geological strata. While the hillside is somewhere in Cezanne's native Provence, the specific location has not been conclusively identified.

Stylistically, the painting relates to scenes of the landscape around Aix-en-Provence that Cezanne was painting in the mid-1880s.

Style: Impressionist
According to the Old Testament, God instructed Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, Abraham’s only son by his wife Sarah, as a test of his faith and obedience (Genesis 22: 1--19). Abraham and his son make their way to the place of sacrifice. Abraham strides up the mountainside with steely resolve, his eyes on the path ahead. Isaac carries a bundle of wood for the altar fire on his back, while his father holds a lighted torch and a knife. When Isaac asks his father where is the lamb to be sacrificed, Abraham replies that the Lord will provide.

In the next episode of the story, Abraham places Isaac on the altar and is about to kill him when an angel appears and tells him not to harm the child. God sends a ram in a thicket to be sacrificed as a burnt offering instead of Isaac and the boy is saved. This episode in the Old Testament is frequently interpreted as a precursor for God's sacrifice of his own son, Jesus, recounted in the New Testament.

The style of the painting is deliberately old fashioned, with precise outlines and odd disparities in scale, while the figures of Abraham and Isaac recall the simplified forms of a medieval woodcut. The landscape background is drawn with meticulous care and is loosely based on Olivier's studies of the countryside around Salzburg, which he first visited in 1815. The distant mountain peak may perhaps be the Watzmann, to the south of the city. However Olivier’s approach to depicting the landscape, with slim feathery trees and pink tinged clouds in the blue sky, also recalls the backgrounds of Italian Renaissance paintings, such as those by Giovanni Bellini.

In 1817 Olivier became a member of the Brotherhood of Saint Luke, an artistic brotherhood (later known as the Nazarenes) founded in Vienna in 1809 by Friedrich Overbeck and Franz Pforr. Olivier shared the Nazarenes' enthusiasm for northern medieval and early Renaissance art and their interest in the revival of religious painting.

Style: Neoclassical
This is Henry Dawkins II (1727--1814) of Over Norton, Oxfordshire; Standlynch Park, Wiltshire and Portman Square, London. He was the third surviving son of Henry Dawkins I (1698--1744) and Elizabeth, daughter of Edward Pennant, Chief Justice of Jamaica.

Henry Dawkins was a member of the Jamaica Assembly during the years 1752--8, and a member of its Council in 1758--9. In 1754 he is recorded as having owned (with his brothers William and James) almost 25,000 acres in Jamaica. The family's fortune was made through the ownership of slaves. By May 1759 he had left Jamaica for England, where he served at various times as Member of Parliament for Southampton, Chippenham and Hindon.

On 24 November 1760 he married Lady Juliana Colyear, daughter of Charles 2nd Earl of Portmore. The couple had eight sons and four daughters. A group portrait of about 1774 by Richard Brompton of The Family of Henry Dawkins (National Trust, Penryn Castle, Bangor, on loan from C.J. Dawkins) shows Henry and Juliana with nine of their children.

It is likely that this pastel portrait of Dawkins was made in Paris, where the artist was based, although there is no definite record of Dawkins visiting the city. A date of between 1750 and 1752 is likely due to the sitter’s young age. Henry’s elder brother James left England for Rome in 1749 and he certainly travelled via Paris, so it is possible that Henry accompanied him there either on that occasion or during another trip in 1751. The style of Dawkins’s wig and costume are consistent with a date of about 1751. His pose, with one hand tucked inside his waistcoat, was one frequently adopted for half-length portraits in the mid-eighteenth century, particularly by English sitters, to signify what François Nivelon had characterised in his The Rudiments of Genteel Behaviour (London, 1737) as ‘manly boldness tempered with modesty.’

Even during his own lifetime Maurice-Quentin de La Tour was regarded as the greatest pastellist of the eighteenth century. Although born in Picardy, he spent almost his entire career in Paris, dominating the market there for portraits in pastel. His extreme perfectionism often placed him in danger of ruining his portraits by overworking them. The relative simplicity of the composition in this portrait may have been due to the limited time that Dawkins had in Paris. The colours, particularly the crimson of the coat, have faded.

Style: Rococo, Neoclassical
In 1871 Monet moved with his family to Argenteuil, a suburb north-west of Paris that was connected to the capital by a 15-minute train journey. During his six-year stay there he painted around 200 pictures of the town and its surroundings. He depicted the ordinary streets, the road bridge, the railway bridge with stream trains puffing across it, river walks and smart villas. The rapidly expanding suburb was known as a popular destination for summer day trips and pleasure boating, but it was not an untouched rural idyll as it also had factories, an ironworks and a brick works that brought wealth to the area.

This picture is one of 18 Argenteuil canvases that record the snowy winter of 1874/5.  It shows the Boulevard Saint-Denis, near Monet’s home, looking towards its junction with the rue de la Voie des Bans, with the Seine beyond. As he worked,  Monet would have had his back to the railway station which brought pleasure trippers and commuters to and from Paris. The figures trudging along the road may be making their way to or from the trains, the snow halting their progress to a snail’s pace, while wavy brown cart tracks snake into the distance, drawing our eye towards the horizon, where distant buildings seem to dissolve in the mist. The snow and fog mask the fact that this is a thoroughly modern suburb, where the road is lined with houses that had been built quite recently.

The picture is the largest of the Argenteuil snow scenes; when Monet worked on a larger scale he was often more interested in achieving a generalised effect than in portraying individual elements. So while some of the smaller snow scenes painted that year are more richly detailed and full of anecdote, this painting focuses instead on atmosphere. It is an overcast afternoon and the sun is slowly fading from the sky. The palette is almost monochromatic, the whites, blues and greys warmed with pink tones. Occasional touches of stronger colour distributed across the canvas serve to bind the composition together. Dabs of red in the trees on the left are repeated in the cart tracks in the middle and the trees on the right. The blue of the central figure is also repeated in the windows of the church, the tracks and the trees. Monet would have brushed in the ground and sky before delineating the tree branches and the cart tracks with spare calligraphic strokes. The paint on the road in the foreground is thicker than elsewhere in the picture, perhaps because Monet was trying to suggest the physical presence of deep snow.

Style: Impressionist
The sunny, windswept beaches of Valencia became one of Sorolla’s best-loved and most popular subjects in the years around 1900, when he achieved international acclaim in Paris. This work, one of his earliest beach scenes, was painted several years before he began to take up the motif with regularity. It followed on the heels of La vuelta de la pesca (Paris, Musée d’Orsay), a monumental canvas of bulls pulling a fishing boat through the surf. As in that painting, Sorolla has elected to represent the seaside as a place of labour rather than leisure: one fisherman stoops to inspect a wicker creel, or trap, while another looks on as a fishing vessel makes its way to shore. The brilliant, angled sunlight beating down on the two standing figures allows Sorolla to revel in depicting both full sun and deep shade. The stark white of the bending man’s shirt rhymes with the colour of the seafoam and cresting waves while the other man and his creel appear, like the bow of the boat behind, in dark-toned shadow. Sorolla first exhibited the painting at Berlin’s Grosse Kunstausstellung in 1896, where it was unanimously awarded the gold medal before being acquired for the Nationalgalerie by its innovative director, Hugo von Tschudi.

Style: Modernist