wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
The Virgin Mary steadies the infant Christ as he attempts to stand on the marble ledge that separates us from the world of the holy figures. He makes a blessing gesture with his right hand while the Virgin gently supports him at the elbow. Both figures look down upon us, suggesting that the image was intended to be hung high up on the wall, and its relatively small size suggests that it was made for private worship at home. Images that stressed the maternal bond between mother and son, as this one does, were often made to appeal particularly to women.

The design of the painting, where the Virgin is placed against a mountainous background that is partly obscured by a dark green hanging, was popularised by Giovanni Bellini, whose workshop produced numerous images of this kind (see, for example, The Virgin and Child and The Virgin and Child by Bellini's workshop). The motif of the marble ledge usually features in these paintings too. Here, the Virgin's cloak falls over the edge into the viewer's space, a visual trick that both suggests another space in front of the ledge and makes it appear as though she is just within reach.

Like the  portrait of a man in our collection, this is an early work by the Venetian artist Marco Basaiti. He signed it at the left edge of the marble parapet, but the bottom part of the signature was cut off when the painting's lower edge was trimmed down before it entered our collection.

Style: Early Renaissance, High Renaissance
A man and child are seated at a table. The man looks attentively at the child, who turns away and picks a grape from a bunch nearby. The rest of the composition is only roughly sketched in; the child’s left arm, the man’s body and the table are unfinished.

The painting was once thought to be by a seventeenth-century Spanish artist, and was formerly attributed to  Diego Velázquez and to Pedro Núñez de Villavicencio (1635--1695), known for his popular childhood scenes. However, it is more likely that it is a copy of a seventeenth-century Spanish painting by an artist working in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. It cannot have been made later than this as the painting was first recorded in the mid-nineteenth century at the Earl of Clare sale in London. During this period, artists copied works by Spanish old masters as part of their academic training.

Style: Neoclassical
The subject of Rosa's painting -- the story of the honest woodsman -- is extremely uncommon in European art. It is taken from Aesop's Fables, a collection of ancient Greek tales with moral lessons. In the story, the god Mercury takes pity on a woodsman who has accidentally dropped his axe into a river. He retrieves two axes from the water, one gold and one silver; the woodsman claims neither as his own and, as a reward for his honesty, Mercury gives him both, along with the original axe. On hearing this a dishonest woodsman threw his own tool in the river and pretended that it was made of precious metal. Rosa's painting shows Mercury in his winged helmet emerging from the water holding a golden axe, and the woodsman dashing forwards to claim it. The god, disgusted by the man's dishonesty, denied him the axe.

Like many themes selected by Rosa, this one has a strong moral message: the virtue of honesty, even at the price of self interest. Rosa was familiar with many of Aesop’s stories; he included references to the author’s work in his satirical poetry, and a volume by Aesop is depicted in his painting Moral Philosophy (private collection). Rosa became increasingly interested in classical philosophy through the group of intellectuals he befriended in Rome during the 1650s and 1660s. He longed to be accepted as a painter of philosophical subjects and greatly resented his reputation as a specialist in landscape and genre scenes. But his dark and awe-inspiring late landscapes, like this one, are among his most powerfully inventive works.

During the 1660s, Rosa's style became increasingly dramatic and turbulent, characterised by stormy clouds, rushing torrents of water and windswept trees that loom threateningly over small figures. In contrast to Rosa's earlier landscapes, which took inspiration from the balanced and harmonious work of Claude and Nicholas Poussin, his contemporaries in Rome, this untamed and hostile scene is theatrical and dynamic. The figures seem tiny and insubstantial beneath the dark, voluminous clouds and masses of dense foliage.

This picture was commissioned around 1663 by Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna, a major collector of landscape painting in Rome. In the dramatic posing of the figures and the contrast between the dark foreground and blue distant mountains, there are similarities with the late works of Dughet, such as Landscape with Elijah and the Angel, which also entered Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna's collection during the early 1660s. Rosa's painting -- for which his patron supposedly sent a blank cheque, allowing the artist to name his price -- was, unusually, paired with a biblical work, The Finding of Moses (Detroit Institute of Arts).

Style: Baroque, Academic
Centre stage, against a shadowy, mostly black-and-white background, the bright red jacket inevitably draws our eyes to the young woman. She leans back -- rather immodestly, a glass of wine held in her lap, knees apart, one foot up on a box -- and smiles directly up at the man offering her an oyster.

This not a polite gesture of thanks for the offer of a canapé to go with her wine. In seventeenth-century Holland, the connotations would have been understood immediately. Oysters were regarded as both an aphrodisiac and a reference to female sexuality: the man's offer is an erotic advance. The woman's response -- implied in her pose, her direct glance and the fact that she is drinking alcohol, which was another well-known aphrodisiac -- suggests complicity.

The closer we look, the more evidence we can find for this interpretation. The box on which the woman rests her toes is actually a foot-warmer -- we are being led to imagine heat rising beneath her skirts. Right next to her, skulking under the table, a cat, a traditional symbol of lust, is licking out an oyster shell. In fact, there are oysters all over the place, empty shells scattered on the floor, and two men chat conspiratorially while one of them prepares another plateful. The curtains behind them are actually the drapes around a bed -- a common piece of furniture in Dutch living rooms, but with more obvious connotations here. If you look closely in the shadows you can see that the table is supported by carvings of naked women, draped with garlands.

Given what else is going on, we would probably be safe to assume that the conversation between the young woman standing by the bed and the man with the hat is likely to be contractual in nature. The setting is a brothel; the two women work there.

Why would a rich Dutch merchant -- the most likely customer for a painting of this type -- want to hang such a painting in his elegant townhouse? This was a society in which religious devotion was considered extremely important, where promiscuity among respectable people would have been roundly condemned. Jan Steen was himself a lifelong Catholic, who also made religious paintings.

But this was also a society with a sense of humour -- as we can tell from its taste in art. People may not have approved of such behaviour, but they saw its funny side and they enjoyed laughing about it. Steen was a master of comic innuendo and the most successful artist of his time at making obscene visual jokes. This scene was popular enough to have been repeated at least once. Another version of it is now in the National Gallery, Oslo; a third is also said to have existed.

Style: Baroque
A saint in a red dalmatic (a long, wide-sleeved tunic) collapses to the ground as a crowd throw stones at him. This is the death of Saint Stephen, the first Christian martyr. Stephen was a deacon in the early Church and, according to the Acts of the Apostles, enraged the authorities in Jerusalem by his preaching. They accused him of blasphemy; at his trial he in turn accused them of betraying and murdering the Messiah. An angry crowd dragged him out of the city and stoned him to death outside its walls: the stones which killed him became his attribute, as can be seen in Crivelli's painting from the Demidoff Altarpiece. Some of the mob have taken off their outer robes to take part in the stoning, and in the foreground a young man in armour rests his hand on a pile of clothes. This is Saul, who later became Saint Paul. At the top left Christ and God the Father appear on a cloud: at his death Stephen claimed to see a vision of Jesus standing beside his Father in heaven.

The composition is based on Domenichino's influential Martyrdom of Saint Stephen (Musée Condé, Chantilly): the right angle of the city walls, the pose of the saint and his vision of God and Christ all derive from that picture. The figure of Saul, however, is closer to Annibale Carracci's representation of the scene in the Louvre, Paris.

The use of these sources suggests that the artist may be Antonio Carracci, son of Agostino and nephew of Annibale (alongside whom he worked in Rome until the latter's death in 1609). There are not many paintings securely attributed to him but The Flood (Louvre, Paris), although much larger in scale, is similar in style, especially in the background figures. If it is indeed by Antonio, it was probably painted around 1610.

Style: Baroque, Academic
From around 1842 and into the 1850s Courbet painted about 20 self portraits in which he presented himself in different guises, often referencing Old Master paintings he copied in the Louvre. This portrait is a reduced version of The Man with the Leather Belt (Musée d’Orsay, Paris), which Courbet painted around 1845--6 and almost certainly exhibited at the Salon of 1846.

Courbet painted replicas of at least three of his self portraits and it was previously thought that he also painted this version of The Man with the Leather Belt. However, although this portrait is close in almost all details to the original, there are major differences between them. In particular, unlike the very finely painted Orsay picture, the brushwork is more cursory and less detailed.

Recent research into the picture’s support and a label on the back also suggests that the painting dates from the early 1880s, and therefore could not have been painted by Courbet himself, who died in 1877. It is instead a copy by someone who had an excellent understanding of the original.

Style: Realist
This picture looks like an Italian Renaissance portrait but is in fact a forgery made in the early twentieth century. It includes elements found in the originals, such as the stone window opening onto a view of the Italian countryside and the view of figures in profile.

It was purchased in 1923 as a fifteenth-century work, possibly by an artist close to Melozzo da Forli (1438--1494). The forger added a stamp with a coat of arms in the top corner intending to suggest the sitters were from the renowned Montefeltro family of Urbino (we have two paintings once owned by Federico da Montefeltro in our collection: Rhetoric and Music).

By 1951 the picture was recognised as a fake. Scientific investigation of the panel in 1996 revealed that some of the pigments used -- including cobalt blue and cadmium yellow -- were not available before the nineteenth century.  The man's cap, too, is more like a women's hat fashionable in around 1913 than a Renaissance garment.

Style: Early Renaissance
The shining Christ Child lies on the ground surrounded by angels, while his mother kneels to worship him and Saint Joseph stands holding a candle. Behind Joseph we see two women in exotic jewelled turbans -- they are the midwives who attended the birth. Angels hover in the air above Christ.

The whole scene takes place in a roofless and crumbling building, perhaps symbolising the old law which Christ replaced. Through its arches we can just make out other episodes from the story of Christ's birth: the Annunciation to the Shepherds at the left and the star appearing to the Three Kings in the centre.

The idea of the infant Christ illuminating the Nativity scene comes from the work of Saint Bridget of Sweden in the fourteenth century. She wrote that in her visions the light of the newborn child was so bright 'that the sun was not comparable to it'. Here, there are five sources of light: the Christ Child, Joseph's candle, the midwife's lantern, the star and the light shining around the angel and the shepherds.

Although this picture is of poor quality, and the style of its underdrawing and painting technique suggests it is from the first decades of the sixteenth century, the composition is close enough to the Portinari Triptych (Florence, Uffizzi) to suggest a connection with Hugo van der Goes. It is one of three surviving versions of a lost painting by van der Goes, and by comparing the three we can get an idea of what the original looked like. The artist of this panel took the setting, the scheme of different kinds of light (natural, divine and artificial), the Virgin and Christ Child and the foreground angel from van der Goes, but also drew on the work of other artists: the figure of Saint Joseph is reminiscent of the early sixteenth-century 'Antwerp Mannerists', and derives ultimately from the work of Rogier van der Weyden.

The artist must have had access to patterns from van der Goes' workshop and used them to create a pastiche based on the lost Nativity, which was probably painted in the early 1470s and may have been the missing left wing of the Monteforte Altarpiece (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin).

Style: High Renaissance
The Virgin Mary sits on the ground under a horse chestnut tree, breastfeeding the Christ Child; the brown object in her right hand is possibly a chestnut. During the Renaissance, images of Mary feeding her son would have reminded viewers of her role as humanity's most important intercessor with Christ.

The composition is an echo of Robert Campin's popular Virgin in the Apse, many versions of which were made in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, among them The Virgin and Child in an Apse with Two Angels.

Behind the Virgin, we see horsemen riding along a road and, on the right, an adult Saint John the Baptist accompanied by a lamb, looking rather like a man walking a dog. In the distance is a walled town on the banks of an estuary. The great towers are three of the towers of Bruges, where Cornelis worked, but it is an imaginary town.

The Virgin's head and hands are stylised and simplified in the same way as in other paintings by Albert Cornelis, and are almost certainly by Cornelis himself. The landscape, however, is different to that in other paintings by Cornelis  -- compare this to The Magdalen in a Landscape. It was perhaps the work of a different landscape specialist, who worked in a style derived from Joachim Patinir.

Round paintings were fairly common in the Low Countries -- Hieronymus Bosch and his followers were fond of circular compositions -- although it is possible that this was painted for the Italian market. It was probably exported to Italy shortly after it was painted, and the name on the back, 'GREGORIO ALBERTI', may be that of an early owner.

Style: High Renaissance
A man kneels before the Virgin Mary and infant Christ, and kisses the child's hand -- this is the Adoration of the Kings, taking place in the ruins of a palace. Saint Joseph, his luggage on a stick over his shoulder, pushes his hat back on his forehead. The wings of this triptych are now lost, but presumably showed the other two kings.

It's a fairly accurate version of the centre panel of the Adoration of the Kings (Museo Nazionale di  Capodimonte, Naples) attributed to Joos van Cleve and painted in about 1525. It's one of several surviving versions of this picture, some closer to the original than others, and seems to be the work of two artists. The painter of the figures followed the Naples Adoration quite closely, down to the colours of the clothes. But the landscape doesn't follow Joos' design; it seems to be a later version, by artists who were not necessarily working in Joos' workshop.

The panel has suffered considerably over the centuries. Not only has it lost its outer wings, but it has been cut down at three edges. The faces of Christ, Joseph and the king are largely reconstructions, while other faces have been extensively retouched; the drapery on Christ's legs has been painted over. The surface of the painting is obscured by dirt and discoloured varnishes.

Style: High Renaissance
Very little is known about Willem Buytewech the Younger and very few of his paintings survive. He was born in Rotterdam, where he was apparently active as a landscape and figure painter -- in this picture, he combines both. The work was once attributed to Jan Wijnants, whose dune landscapes it recalls (look at A Landscape with a High Dune and Peasants on a Road for example).

A well-dressed man in a gold-coloured coat with a white collar and red sleeve sits on a fallen tree. There are sheep and goats on the rise ahead of him. Further ahead, almost lost in the stunted trees, are two small houses; beyond them, beneath a broken sky, the lonely dunes stretch away towards the sea.

The man's dog looks up at him and a grey horse waits patiently for him to resume his journey. But the horse has a heavy collar and no stirrups; perhaps it has been harnessed to a cart or wagon. On one side of the central group is a large, broken wheel -- perhaps telling part of the story, but the rest of the vehicle is nowhere to be seen.

Style: Baroque
The infant Christ stands on the Virgin Mary's lap and reaches up to embrace her. With his right hand he points up at her face. Saint Joseph looks on at the right, his hands crossed over his chest in reverence. In one hand he appears to hold a staff, and in the other he seems to hold either a carpenter's square (referring to his profession) or a book.

The very dark background from which Saint Joseph emerges makes it difficult to see the details. The picture is damaged in many places by long vertical cracks probably caused by shrinking of the wooden panel on which it is painted.

This is one of a group of paintings by an as yet unidentified artist. It was once thought to be by Sodoma as it bears some resemblance to his style, which was derived from that of Leonardo.

Style: High Renaissance
Small animals and birds enliven this barren landscape consisting of sand-coloured rock formations framed by trees, shrubs, and trailing vines.

In the left foreground, standing before a natural stone arch leading to a distant, more verdant view, is a group of five figures. Saint John the Baptist, depicted with his customary attributes of the lamb and reed cross with banderole, and wearing a camel skin under his red cloak, is confronting four men in exotic dress, possibly a group of Pharisees or Sadducees (Matthew 3:7).

A pentimento of another figure clad in red that was overpainted soon after the painting’s completion, is visible inside the grotto. Another change has become apparent in the figure of Saint John: The ghostly shape of an outstretched arm and index finger pointing towards the grotto suggests that this was at some stage a different figure altogether.

Joos de Momper frequently collaborated with other artists who provided the figures, as was customary for landscape painters of the period. In this case it has not yet been possible to ascribe the figures to a particular artist with any degree of certainty.

De Momper is a key artist in the transition between the ‘world landscapes’ of the 16th century and the more naturalistic Flemish landscapes of the 17th century. His mountainous landscapes, for which he became most famous, might have been loosely inspired by his journey through the Alps, but he deliberately deviates from nature, as observed here, in favour of highly formulaic fantasies.

Style: Baroque
Edward Gardiner was Gainsborough's nephew, and recorded to have spent time in his studio. He is depicted in this portrait at the age of around eight or nine. It is thought that the painting was created as a pendant to a portrait of the sitter’s sister Susan, at the same age.

The portrait of Edward reflects the influence of the Flemish portraitist Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641) in the loose brushwork and the style of finish. The child appears to be wearing the same pale blue costume as the sitter in Gainsborough’s painting The Blue Boy (Huntington Collection, California), suggesting that this may have been a prop in the artist’s studio. This use of historic costume also makes reference to the work of Van Dyck whose work Gainsborough admired. Gainsborough’s emulation of great artists in his later work reflects growing confidence in his own abilities.

Style: Georgian
A Youthful Saint reading and A Saint with a Fortress and Banner are panels from an altarpiece painted by Girolamo da Santacroce in about 1512--25. Originally, they would probably have flanked a central image, perhaps of the Virgin and Child. This type of multi-panelled altarpiece is known as a polyptych and was common in Italy before the end of the fifteenth century. By the time this altarpiece was painted it was more usual in Venice to include all the holy figures together in one unified composition, known in Italian as a sacra conversazione (sacred conversation), which allowed for a psychological connection between the figures. The patron's choice of the more traditional polyptych may relate to the location or community for which the altarpiece was made.

We do not know for which church the altarpiece was painted. Numerous artists with the name Santacroce were working in Venice, and some also had connections to Bergamo. Girolamo da Santacroce was trained by the Venetian artist Gentile Bellini and he probably worked as an assistant to Giovanni Bellini, as well as Cima da Conegliano. These paintings show the influence of Giovanni Bellini's late style in their grassy pastoral landscapes, cloud-streaked skies, rich colour palettes, simplified forms and contemplative mood.

A Youthful Saint reading has previously been identified as Saint John the Evangelist, who is frequently depicted as a young fair-haired man dressed in green and red, reading the Gospel of John. Although this theory is possible it is not certain.

The banner with a red cross on a white background in A Saint with a Fortress and Banner is usually associated with Saint George, who legend has it killed a ferocious dragon that was terrorising the city of Lydda. The saint in Girolamo da Santacroce's image holds a model of a stone fortress which might possibly symbolise Lydda. However, the saint does not wear armour and he is not accompanied by a dragon as is usual in depictions of Saint George, so his identity is also uncertain. It may be that he represents a local patron saint and the building he holds relates to the town or city for which the altarpiece was painted. Current research suggests that he could be Terentius, the patron saint of Pesaro.

The choice of saints in an altarpiece usually reflects a number of possible connections: the dedication of the church, the Order to which the church belonged (for example, Dominican or Franciscan), the dedication of the altar itself, any local patron saints, and usually the particular devotion or name-sake of the patron. Until more documentary evidence about the origins of these panels comes to light we can only speculate as to the identity of the saints they depict.

Style: High Renaissance