wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
Saint Mary Magdalene is here depicted with eyes raised heavenward, a sign of her devotion and penance. The Gospels of the New Testament describe Mary of Magdala as one of Christ's followers, a witness to his burial and resurrection. She was later identified with another biblical figure, an unnamed woman understood to be a repentant prostitute -- an identification which is almost certainly untrue.

The image of Mary Magdalene as a sinner who was redeemed through her devotion to Christ pervaded representations in the seventeenth century. Guido Reni has painted the saint with her iconic long blonde hair, indicative of her status as a fallen woman and a reference to the story of the sinner who washed Christ's feet and dried them with her hair. She is dressed in her typical garb of a red cloak loosely draped around her, beneath which she appears to be naked. The nondescript background provides the painting with minimal narrative, suggesting perhaps that this was a work intended for quiet meditation.

Reni frequently depicted Mary Magdalene in penance -- the artist and his studio produced dozens of variants on the theme. This painting would appear to derive from one of the many full-length depictions of the saint in the wilderness painted by Reni and his studio in the 1620s and 1630s, one of which is today in the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome. Another bust-length version of the saint, somewhat similar to this work but closer in design to the full-length Roman painting, is in the Museo del Prado, Madrid. Reni and his studio began to focus on reduced-size copies and variants of popular compositions from around 1630 onwards, when the master was facing increasing economic pressures.

At one time, this work was considered to have been painted by Reni's studio assistants, but it is now generally accepted as an autograph, its iridescent flesh tones and fluid brushwork consistent with Reni's style in the mid-1630s. Mary Magdalene's pose and her intricate, delicately highlighted curls are reminiscent of another autograph Penitent Magdalene ascribed a similar date (Walters Art Museum, Baltimore).

Reni's numerous interpretations of this subject indicate that they were enormously successful; in seventeenth-century Europe, his paintings of Mary Magdalene were popular among seats of religious power, the aristocracy and wealthy middle class alike. There are several explanations for such popularity. The sacrament of Penance, for example, became increasingly significant in the period following the Council of Trent, and penitent saints were frequently portrayed by artists as examples for viewers to follow. Mary Magdalene's sexuality is also associated with her popularity as a subject, but Reni's paintings do not present her as sexually inviting; rather, they illustrate the dangers of temptation and bodily pleasure, while underlying the importance of sinners' penance and redemption.

Style: Caravaggist, Academic
A young woman takes a moment from her spinning to look out from a dark room, her gaze direct. Although she holds a long length of raw half-spun wool between her hands, her mind isn't on the task. She is more interested in whoever has come in through the unseen door and taken her by surprise.

Caspar Netscher specialised in small genre scenes before he took to portrait painting, and such pictures of women alone in a domestic setting seem to bridge the gap between the two -- half genre, half portrait. This seems like a real woman looking out at us, though we don't know who she was. Netscher took infinite pains to portray texture faithfully -- like his teacher, Gerard ter Borch -- especially the rich fabrics of the fashions of his day. In this picture, the young woman's white satin skirt gleams in the light of a candle or an oil lamp, the fur and velvet of the jacket is sumptuous and tactile. He shows exactly how hair was styled at this point in the seventeenth century, curl for curl, ribbon for ribbon and not a hair out of place. Although less distinct in the background, we sense the slick polish of the wood of the spinning wheel and its mechanism, glinting as it picks up the light.

Because of her costly dress, it's easy to assume that the young woman is either the wife or daughter of a prosperous merchant or official. Spinning would certainly be one of her household tasks. But this is a posed picture made to be sold as a decorative item and the clothing may have been a prop kept in the artist's studio for a model to pick up and wear. Similar red jackets were in fashion and appear in other pictures, such as Frans van Mieris's A Woman in a Red Jacket feeding a Parrot. At the time, maids too might own such garments. These maids were to be found mostly in very prosperous families and were reasonably well paid, often buying jewels or expensive clothes as an investment for the future -- a kind of pension.

The direct, faintly enquiring gaze of the young woman adds another dimension to the picture. She leans forward, one hand brushing a frond of soft wool against her half-smiling lips. A single pearl nestles against her cheek under her ringlets and the white shift pushed back over the jacket reveals her pale neck. She toys with the length of wool, and the white satin gleams silver in the light as it slides over her knee.

The erotic hint is subtle. This is the young Netscher still near the beginning of his career, anxious to make his work marketable to a wide audience and providing for everyone in a household: a fashion plate, a lesson in domesticity, an example of his skill in portraying reality -- and just enough allure to make some wish they were the unexpected visitor to the quiet room.

Style: Baroque
This painting is a good example of the potential pitfalls when interpreting art of this kind. Are we looking at a simple, slightly sentimental domestic scene -- something to enjoy as a window on some of the details and priorities of seventeenth-century life? Or is the artist hinting at a story of intrigue and seduction, as is often the case in similar scenarios? For example, the pipe and flagon we see here could have sexual overtones; they certainly do in other paintings of the time such as Sorgh’s Two Lovers at Table which is also in the National Gallery.

But such double meanings do not resonate in the paintings of van Brekelenkam. For him, a pipe was a pipe, and he was more concerned with paying homage to diligent housekeepers and domestic harmony. This painting is a case in point.

It shows a contented couple -- not household servants, but husband and wife. We are in a kitchen, so the woman takes centre stage and she sits bathed in light from the high window. She catches our eye, confident perhaps that we will approve of her housekeeping. The pots and pans are clean and orderly (they are often depicted on the floor in such scenes) and she has laid out lunch on an immaculate linen cloth, still crisp with creases from the iron. It’s a simple meal of bread, cheese and ham, but there is plenty to eat for both of them.

The man puffs on his pipe and enjoys the heat of the fire in the shadowy background. We might think that he could do a little more to help -- he’s just discarded his old pipe and left it in two pieces on the floor. No doubt the wife will soon reach for the nearby broom to restore order. But his job was not to help in the kitchen, but to provide the necessary money to finance the household.

While typical, the scene is not a real one. Van Brekelenkam’s interiors are imaginary, and his figures are generally not portraits. Instead they represent atmospheric moments in an ideal home. And, if this is a model couple, then they are a patriotic one too. It is hard to see but in the background, partly hidden by the chimney, is a map of the Netherlands (as is often the case in seventeenth-century maps, north is not at the top but on the right). It bears the lion of Holland and would have had particular resonance at the time. The painting was made in 1653, only five years after this part of the Netherlands had finally managed to win independence from the Roman Catholic kings of Spain.

Van Brekelenkam worked in Leiden all his life and specialised in such genre paintings. The National Gallery has two more. One, A Woman Asleep by a Fire, is also set in a kitchen. The other, Interior of a Tailor’s Shop, has another map of Holland on the chimney breast.  

Style: Baroque
Goya shows us a scene based on a satirical play first performed in 1698: The Forcibly Bewitched by Antonio de Zamora (1660–1727). The reluctant priest Don Claudio is being frightened into marriage with Doña Leonora. He's been made to believe that a slave, Lucia, has bewitched him, and that his life will last only as long as the lamp in her room remains alight. Blacks and greys dominate the painting, and contrast with the flash of orange of the candle flame.

We see the deluded and terrified Claudio eagerly replenishing the oil in the lamp, which is in the form of an almost life-size ram. The inscription in the bottom right contains the first part of two words, lampara descomunal ('monstrous lamp') -- the words that the fearful and superstitious Claudio cries out loud while pouring the oil.

A grotesque painting of dancing donkeys decorates the wall behind, adding to the general air of mystery and sorcery. But the play is a comedy, and the hero's exaggerated pose and staring eyes are intended to make us laugh at his gullibility.

Goya's late works often explored satirical themes, reflecting his view of an unstable and flawed society. In this painting Goya may be protesting against the Spanish Inquisition, which promoted the Catholic faith and persecuted Jews and Muslims, for here he makes fun of folklore and the Church-led return to medieval fears.

The painting was a private commission, one of six scenes of witchcraft and sorcery painted for the Duke and Duchess of Osuna in 1798 and exhibited together at the Royal Academy in Madrid the following year. The Osunas were Goya's most loyal patrons between 1785 and 1799. Their palace in Madrid and country house on the outskirts of the city served as meeting places for artists, actors and musicians, and Goya probably attended the private theatre the couple owned. The Duchess was a keen reformer of Spanish society, critical of the Church's corruption and the superstition of people who still believed in witchcraft.

Style: Romantic
Henri-Joseph Harpignies’ garden was clearly a great joy to him: it became one of his favourite subjects and he painted it many times, making sketches and watercolours as well as oil paintings. In this picture, painted a few years after he retired to the country, he has depicted the garden in great detail, from the plants and trees to the texture of old walls and flower pots. He has outlined some of the shapes and forms with a slender black line drawn with a fine brush. They are delicate but significant, giving a quirky, 'cut-out' style rather like a collage.

The garden rises up ahead of us, starting from a formal parterre enclosed with a wall. Circular beds with roses of many different varieties and shades of red and pink and creamy white suggest that Harpignies was interested in the flowers he grew and didn’t see them purely as an attractive background. Shelves of potted plants and seedlings add to a feeling that he may have had a hands-on interest in horticulture. A figure in white with a pink hat walks up a slope on the left that leads up to a lawn -- perhaps the artist himself carrying an easel or even a gardening tool. The hat and the red and pink roses below contrast with the strong greens surrounding them, subtly enlivening the lower part of the picture so that it holds its own under the brilliance of the bright blue sky.

An old, grey stone wall supporting climbing plants surrounds the lawn. From here, stone steps lead up to an avenue of trees, one of which partially hides an intriguing white tower. Harpignies loved trees, knew them well and always painted them in accurate detail; the eminent French writer Anatole France described him as 'the Michelangelo of trees'. Just as he painted various species of roses, he painted various species of trees, from spindly conifers to tall oaks. A row of neatly rounded tree tops -- hornbeam, perhaps, or chestnut -- are lined up like a regiment of leafy troops.

Harpignies had retired to his property (La Trémellerie at Saint Privé on the banks of the river Loing, south-east of Paris) in about 1879. He kept a studio in Paris, but set up a second one in his garden, full of light and air. Students came to work with him there, and for many years he took them out on painting and sketching trips into the surrounding countryside. He divided his time between Le Trémellerie and the Côte d'Azure, continuing to paint right up until his death in 1916.

Style: Impressionist
In the seventeenth century the Little Ice Age settled over Northern Europe. Rivers and canals in Holland froze over and people took to the ice for work, leisure -- and accidents. Hendrik Avercamp, just starting out as an artist, took to it too. His life's work became the depiction of winter scenes full of incident.

These are the people he knew; he had grown up among them. Under the grey light of a winter's day, but warmed by the soft pink of a cloud creeping across one side of the vast sky, they continued their lives almost unchanged -- they did business, gossiped, tended children, had fun -- but sped up on skates.

On the right, a huge barrack-like building, made less forbidding by cheerful red bricks tinged by the pink of the cloud, is possibly a brewery. In front of it, where the light on the snow is brightest, an old man sits on a wooden chair, a blanket over his knees. He is said to personify winter, often shown as an aged person, wrinkled and frail. The man leaning against the stone vat outside the building seems untroubled by the cold, unlike the young woman huddled up in the boat stuck in the ice close to us, her hands under her black apron to keep them warm. In the corner, a fashionable young couple show off their new outfits, determinedly stylish in spite of the chill breeze that riffles her sash.

The view opens up behind the outbuilding at the end of the bridge, bringing more incidents to catch the curious eye. In the distance, men play kolf, the forerunner of golf. A little nearer a mother bends over a small wooden sledge to tuck in her children and make them cosy. But her husband, holding the sledge reins, has eyes elsewhere. A young woman has taken a tumble. She has lost her hat and her skirts are dishevelled. A cloaked man with a peaked cap points at her with a skip of glee as he looks up her petticoats.

Not everyone is as frivolous. To the left, stately women are driven past the incident in a horse-drawn sleigh with a tiny white horse on the back as a coat of arms. Over by the outbuilding a man hurries home, his long fishing pole over one shoulder, dangling a meagre catch. Behind him a square hole in the ice cut for fishing. He passes a gossiping group of smart people, the woman with her hands in a muff, her face covered in a mask to cover her complexion from the cold.

A little further away a red, white and blue flag flies proudly. It's the flag of the Dutch Republic, newly released from years of rule from Spain. Avercamp, like many artists of the time, made it a feature to appeal to the newly independent burghers who would buy his work. His pictures would hang in their homes to entertain and amuse, but also to be regarded with patriotic pride.

Style: Baroque
According to the Gospel of John, Mary Magdalene wept when she saw that the tomb in which Christ had been buried was empty. A man appeared and asked her why she was crying. Thinking he was the gardener, she asked him where the body was -- but as soon as he spoke her name, she realised it was Christ. She reached out to touch him, but he stopped her: 'Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God' (John 20: 17). Noli me tangere is Latin for 'Do not touch me'.

Mary Magdalene kneels before Christ as though she has just fallen to the ground in shock and reverence after recognising him. She reaches out to touch him but he recoils and puts his hand out to stop her. In his right hand he holds a banner with the symbol of the Resurrection -- a red cross on a white background -- affixed to a staff with a cross at the top.

Christ is raised up on a grassy area that is planted with a variety of saplings, indicating new life. This new life is the eternal life available, according to the Gospels, through belief in Christ's miraculous resurrection from the dead. A vine, rich with grapes, encircles the pruned branches of a large tree creating an elaborate arch that frames Christ's slender figure. The bark of the tree is cracked, revealing a hollow within the trunk; it appears almost dead, except for the fresh branches which have sprung from the pruned stumps.

Wrapped around the branches of the tree is a grapevine -- a detail also found in Mantegna's grisaille painting Samson and Delilah and in the Agony in the Garden, which he made for the predella of the San Zeno altarpiece (Musée des Beaux Arts, Tours). The grapes symbolise the wine drunk by Christians at Mass in memory of Christ's death and resurrection, which was believed to transform into Christ's blood. Within the tree is a snake, slithering its way up to a nest of young chicks -- this must refer to the devil, who appeared to Adam and Eve in the guise of a snake, tempting them to eat the fruit which God had forbidden them. The moment came to represent the sinfulness of humanity, and it was this sin for which Christ's death and resurrection atoned.

A slightly more unusual feature of the picture is the beehive, swarming with bees, just behind Mary; one also appears in Mantegna's version of the Agony in the Garden for the predella of the San Zeno altarpiece. The beehive was a symbol of the Christian Church, and the bees its virtuous and diligent Christians who worked to spread the Gospel message. The outpouring of bees here might be a reference to Christ's command to Mary to spread the news to the disciples, who would then preach his message across the world.

The minute, sharp folds in the draperies and the use of gold to highlight the foliage behind Christ are characteristic of Mantegna's style but as with the other pictures in the  series -- The Maries at the Sepulchre and The Resurrection -- the quality is not comparable and the landscape background is much softer, with blurred edges.

Style: Early Renaissance
Red immediately attracts the eye, especially if you contrast it with green, its complementary colour. So in this, one of the largest of Aelbert Cuyp's many landscapes, the first thing that catches our attention is the scarlet coat of the horseman.

But this red is not a stop signal; we are not invited to be distracted by him for long. After all, he has his back to us and is preoccupied with chatting to a shepherdess. Instead, we follow the direction of his whip, which he points away into the distance. And the concept of distance -- just as much as the animals and figures in the foreground -- is at the heart of this painting.

Cuyp has carefully constructed the scene so that our eye is consistently drawn from near to far. First, he sets up a frame at the bottom of the picture -- a line of thistles and other plants, half in shade, half caught by the sun -- to offset the figures and animals in the foreground. Then he uses the high trees at the painting's edge as a second frame, just behind the foreground figures. The trees form a strong upright line, and the overhanging branches arch inwards along the same line as the horseman’s whip. That diagonal, leading away towards the unseen horizon, is repeated several times. It recedes deeper into the landscape, then dissolves in the bright sunlight which streams in from the left and reflects off the still water. Look at the declining profile of the dark green trees, over the church tower and more dark foliage, to the group of horsemen in the middle distance. The same line is echoed by the sloping hillside beyond, and again in the silvery-grey cloud formation above.

As well as this long view stretching for miles into the distance, Cuyp has infused the scene with a sense of deep pastoral tranquillity. It is underlined by the quiet docility of the animals, but also the summer sunshine which bathes both figures and landscape in a golden glow. It was an effect which had recently been made fashionable by Dutch painters who had travelled to Rome and been influenced both by Italian painting styles and by the warmer light of the south.

Cuyp’s unique skill was his ability to combine this exotic light with something his customers must have found much more familiar: livestock. He was especially well-known for his ability to paint cows. He knew how to make them seem real, to suggest the weight of their horned heads, their sleepy eyes, their solidity and their strength. Cuyp’s patrons would have valued this: such a convincing, idyllic vision of the peaceful coexistence between man and cattle would also have been a reassuring reminder of one of the key sources of the nation’s prosperity. During the seventeenth century large amounts of flooded land had been reclaimed and converted to pasture, especially around Cuyp’s home town of Dordrecht. This, combined with improvements in breeding stock and better feeding practice, had fuelled a boom in cattle farming. Cheese and butter were not only national staples but key exports, and an important source of wealth.

Style: Baroque