wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
Fourteen smartly dressed ladies kneel in prayer -- female members of a confraternity (religious organisation) praying to their patron saint; the male members are shown in another painting. They are clearly meant to be recognisable people, although none has yet been identified.

We are not sure who this painting is by, but it's thought to have been made in Milan in around 1500. It was once part of a banner carried in the confraternity's processions -- it was painted on silk or canvas, and later mounted on wood. The paint is very thin, and has been much damaged by flaking and extensively repaired.

The women wear a variety of clothes, reflecting both their age and their social status. Older women tend to have their hair covered, sometimes by several layers of veils, while the younger ones tie it back in fine nets held in place by narrow bands. At the front, a young lady in green stands between two older women. These three have the highest social status: they the most richly dressed and are shown in profile, as was traditional for aristocratic portraits (such as Giovanni da Oriolo's Leonello d'Este). Two wear newly fashionable square necklines and sleeves slashed at the shoulders to reveal puffs of their linen underdresses. The lady nearest to us, in red, has a fine veil and gold rings on her fingers. The blonde hair of the woman next to her is tied up in a net; a pendant -- a large ruby surrounded by pearls -- hangs from her circlet, which is also set with pearls. Her green velvet dress has turned-back cuffs and she wears white gloves with small tassels. Gloves at this time were usually made of soft suede, although they could be silk; those produced in Milan were especially fine.

Their dress suggests they are members of the ruling elite. Milan at this time was governed by the Sforzas and the young lady's pendant is extremely close to one depicted in the borders of manuscripts made for that family.  She could perhaps be Isabella d'Aragona, who married Gian Galeazzo Sforza, Duke of Milan, in 1489; she looks not unlike a portrait bust of Isabella now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Women were often stylised to fit with contemporary ideals of beauty, however, so it isn't really possible to identify her precisely.

Style: High Renaissance
Neither the soft, hazy light nor the rocky mountain path leading up through sparse birch trees is typical of a seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting; such a picture would show green, flat countryside lit with a cool, northern light.

This is Italy -- an imaginary view based on a Dutch artist’s experience of the Mediterranean countryside and created on his return to his native land, using sketches and drawings made while abroad. But the powerful white bull wading in the quiet pool is something that a Dutch audience would appreciate, since cattle were prized as a source of their prosperity. Goats were more likely to be seen as Italian, but cows were seen as particularly Dutch.

In many of his paintings Jan Both places us high up, as if on a mountainside, looking down at a vast, mellow landscape. But in this picture we are almost on a level with the animals and men, and the view of the distance is limited. It’s painted on an oak panel, which helped the smooth application of paint, allowing Both to show intricate detail. We see the small tuft of hair on a goat’s chin as he looks up from drinking, the reflection of a sapling in the still water and leaves fluttering against the gold sky.

Both sometimes invited other artists to paint the figures in his pictures, as in The Judgement of Paris: Cornelis van Poelenburgh, who had also been in Italy for some time, painted the mythical characters. A sharing of labour was quite common practice at this time. An artist could -- and did often -- specialise in a specific genre of painting, and could improve the drapery, background landscape or figures in someone else’s picture, which in no way detracted from people's appreciation of the skills of the main artist.

But in Men with an Ox and Cattle by a Pool, Both painted the figures himself, suggesting character in a few strokes of the brush: the conversation between the elderly goatherd and the mounted peasant on the left, and the hunched shoulders of the herdsman faced with the stony pathway rising ahead of him. The silhouette of his broad-brimmed hat seems to pierce the sky over the horizon, the angle telling us that he’s turning his head -- perhaps for a last glimpse of the distant, misty plain before he turns the corner and the climb begins.

The three years that Jan Both spent in Italy in his youth were spent studying the landscape and light of the countryside around Rome, known as the Campagna. There at the same time were the great French landscape artists, Claude and Poussin, whose work had a profound influence on the young Both. When he returned to his native Utrecht, Both continued to paint in the Italianate style he had adopted in Rome, and which proved to be successful with Dutch collectors.

Style: Baroque
Shortly after the founding of their city, the ancient Romans were faced with a serious problem: they had no wives, and therefore no children and no future. Their leader Romulus came up with an inventive and unscrupulous solution: they hosted celebratory games and invited their neighbours, the Sabines, to bring their families. At a given signal, the Romans seized the young Sabine women, carried them off and married them. Appalled at this barbarous behaviour, the Sabines waged war, but the abducted women intervened to stop the fighting. Peace was declared, and according the Roman historian Livy, 'they made one people out of two'.

This painting is one of two from the front of a cassone, a large decorated chest that was an important piece of domestic furniture throughout Italy during the Renaissance. Cassoni were often associated with marriages, and adorned with scenes appropriate to a family environment, giving moral lessons and establishing what were then thought to be proper role models for husbands, wives and children.

Here, in the first scene, the games are shown as a joust, watched by spectators in fifteenth-century dress, with occasional classical details. In the background, the walls of Rome enclose a construction site: barren ground and a building covered in scaffolding. In the foreground, knights in armour charge each other; one on a black horse knocks another to the ground. Around them, mounted squires carry spare lances and shields, and a trumpeter blows a trumpet. A small banner hangs from the instrument labelled 'S.P.Q.[R]', which stands for senatus populusque romanus (the senate and people of Rome).

The men are positioned at the front of the stands while the young women, their future victims, are seated on rows of raised benches under a red awning. In the centre Romulus, wearing a toga and a crown, sits on a throne surrounded by his entourage. In front of him, three men seated at a green table act as referees.

Style: Early Renaissance
A young girl holding a lamb tilts her head up and back to gaze at us. She has light green eyes, rosy cheeks and lightly parted lips. Her auburn hair is loosely pulled back by a light pinkish ribbon. She wears a loose-fitting white chemise that has slipped off her shoulder, leaving it bare. In her arms she tenderly holds a lamb, which is decorated with a blue ribbon. The girl and lamb occupy the immediate foreground, making them appear close to us and giving the picture a feeling of intimacy. The background is an undistracting plain buff brown, as in many of Greuze's similar works. The picture is unfinished and covered in a patchy worn varnish which has discoloured, affecting its appearance.

Although the lamb is associated with Christ in religious art, it is likely that here it symbolises innocence, patience, gentleness and humility. However, Greuze's painting sends mixed messages as although these qualities are suggested by the girl’s youth and seemingly innocent gaze, her bare shoulder and provocatively parted lips suggest a more knowing interaction with us.

Greuze painted young women with pets with sentimental or moralistic overtones into the 1780s and 1790s. Greuze’s pictures of young women cuddling pets, implying their ability to feel emotion, relate to the eighteenth-century cult of 'sensibility' fostered by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and others. The fusion and confusion between youth and maturity, innocence and corruption were also explored in contemporary novels such as Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses, published in 1782.

Greuze’s single-figure genre paintings were highly sought-after and made good money for him. He painted at least four compositions of girls holding lambs, suggesting that the theme was particularly popular. The best known of these is his Innocence, which is an oval format picture with the girl and lamb facing frontally -- the finest version of this composition is in the Wallace Collection in London. He also painted a girl resting a lamb on a marble pedestal (private collection). The girl’s features are more individualised in that painting, suggesting that it might be a portrait. There is also a slightly larger-scale painting by Greuze known as L’Agneau Chéri (‘The Darling Lamb’), sold at Christie's Paris in 2010, in which the figures are depicted full length. There is a slightly reduced copy of our painting  after Greuze in the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth.

Style: Rococo, Neoclassical
Seated on a delicate throne and dressed in glowing colours, Christ places a jewelled and gilded crown on his mother Mary's head. Graceful angels kneel before them, swinging censers of incense and making music. This is the coronation of the Virgin, the final drama of Mary's life, and a very popular subject in medieval and Renaissance Italy. According to Christian legend, Mary's soul was carried up to heaven after her death and she was crowned as Queen of Heaven.

This feast of gold and colour is a perfect example of early Renaissance painting. It originally appeared in the centre of a very large polyptych  painted by Lorenzo Monaco for the monastery of  San Benedetto fuori della Porta Pinti in Florence. Other panels from the same altarpiece survive in the National Gallery and in other collections.

The composition, with Christ and the Virgin together on a single throne surrounded by angels and saints, was derived from an altarpiece Giotto made around 1334 for the Baroncelli chapel. It was repeated on many fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Florentine altarpieces (like Jacopo di Cione's The Coronation of the Virgin).

The gorgeous colours are carefully arranged to complement each other and set up visual harmonies across the panel. Christ's brilliant blue mantle -- painted with lapis lazuli, a pigment more expensive than gold -- is set off by the glowing yellow of its lining and the pink of his tunic; all are echoed in the dress of the angel with the portative organ who kneels before the throne. On either side of the throne angels with golden hair and delicate pink cheeks gaze up adoringly, their lips open in songs of praise, their careful symmetry emphasised by their matching outfits.

Lorenzo Monaco was especially skilled at gilding techniques. The gilding of the background and haloes was done first, before the painting, and you can see the red bole where the gold of the background has worn away. The haloes of the angels, Christ and the Virgin were burnished and then stamped with different punches to create patterns which would have flickered in the candlelight.

The sgraffito cloth of honour was painted with vermilion, a red pigment, over burnished gold that was punched to suggest raised gold threads. The cushion on which Christ and the Virgin sit has been modelled by punching to suggest the light and shade of its folded fabric. Mordant gilding, where gold leaf is applied over a glue, decorates the edges and hems of the draperies: look closely and you can see the delicate fringe around the edge of the Virgin's veil.

Some of the colours have changed over time: the Virgin's robe has almost entirely faded from a deep pinkish-mauve to white, and the vermilion of the cloth of honour has darkened. The gilded inscription along the base of the parapet is now almost invisible. At some point an arched doorway was cut into the centre of the panel for a tabernacle to store the bread of the Eucharist. It does not seem to have been original, and had been filled in and painted over before the eighteenth century.

Style: Gothic, Early Renaissance
David Teniers the Younger was the most famous and successful seventeenth-century Dutch painters of peasant life. Such pictures were popular because they often showed the countryside -- an enjoyable view for a city dweller -- but more particularly because they showed its inhabitants as awkward, often ugly, probably stupid, but always funny in seventeenth-century terms.

Teniers painted caricatures, placing them in an imaginary, generalised landscape, seldom showing anywhere identifiable. It was simply a background to the comic events acted out by his characters. In this picture a stream passes in front of a farmhouse with a thatched roof. A substantial church appears in the background, perhaps a suggestion that the bad behaviour of the characters is under surveillance. There is often a moral point to Teniers’ pictures, at the time enjoyed by polite middle-class purchasers.

In the centre, three men stand facing each other in a tight circle. Their three long sticks cross each other in a complicated pattern that suggests disorder. One man reaches into an inner pocket and looks with a shifty half-smile at the man in the smart blue coat, whose straight back hints at a military background. The old man on the left leans heavily on his stick. He has a large nose and white beard and a slightly blank stare, but the jaunty feather in his cap implies that he isn’t as feeble as he appears.

They resemble versions of traditional characters from the ancient Greek comedy that had passed down through the ages and still existed in the form of the Italian commedia dell’arte which had spread across Europe: Arlecchino, or Harlequin, the trickster; Pantalone, or Pantaloon, old and doddery but with his wits about him; and Il Capitano, the Captain, a boastful show-off and a coward at heart, always confounded by the others. The man running away with the handful of twigs would have been a Zanne, an acrobat who would enthusiastically whack people with a slapstick before disappearing at the first sign of trouble. The young woman looking back at the men from the doorway of the farm is like one of the female characters there to provide love interest, who may be complicit in any scams being played out.

In the background, the configuration of the foreground figures is copied by three men adding to the joke by standing in a circle to relieve themselves against a post. A fourth makes use of a handy doorway, turning back in a repeat of the woman’s position in the foreground. The commedia dell’arte was simple, basic and bawdy and so are Teniers’ paintings. He was influenced by the work of Adriaen Brouwer, whose depictions of peasants stemmed from the same sources but were even more extreme in their ugliness and lewd humour. His Tavern Scene, also in the National Gallery's collection, makes Teniers' work seem restrained by comparison.

Style: Baroque
A middle-aged man with a luxuriant beard gazes past us into the distance. He holds a scroll in one hand and lays the other across a pair of brown leather gloves which rest on a table. His black hat has lappets, turned up and fastened to the brim; in cold weather they could have been let down over the ears and tied under the chin. We don't know who the man is, though a very similar portrait of him, minus the hands, is in the Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco. The clothes and the cut of the beard indicate that it was probably painted in around 1550.

The picture is painted in oils on a limewood panel, with a chalk ground and a very thin priming of lead white pigment. Technical analysis revealed some underdrawing, with minor changes and one major change: the right hand and scroll are painted on top of an area that was partially scraped out. The original hand is still present, higher than the visible hand and clutching a different object. Oddly, the hands seem to have been painted by different artists. The altered right hand is painted in a different technique to the face and left hand, using little or no blue. The hands seem to have been derived from paintings by Jean Clouet, father of François Clouet.

When the painting was bequeathed to the National Gallery in the late nineteenth century, its owner, Wynn Ellis, believed it to be by Holbein. Indeed it was probably one of two portraits described as by Holbein which were in the library of his house in Cadogan Place, London (the other was A Man holding a Glove by Jean Gossart). Since it entered our collection it has been variously described as 'Flemish School', 'French School, Sixteenth Century (Imitation)', and 'French(?) School, Sixteenth(?) Century', and it has been suggested that it should be associated with Corneille de Lyon.

There seems no reason not to think the painting is sixteenth century. It may have been painted by an associate of Corneille, perhaps a former assistant, who knew the work of the Clouets. The artist, whoever he was, has distorted the figure in various ways. The hands are rather small; the cranium is shrunk and the eyebrows raised; the eyes are much too far apart; the near eye is different in shape from the far eye and occupies too much of the near side of the face. The end of the nose is too far in profile and the chin seems to have been lengthened. Some of the same distortions are found in a portrait of an unidentified man in the collection of Gene Accas in Los Angeles.

There are two seals on the back in red wax, which were used to secure a piece of paper. They are from the same matrix -- a mould in which something is cast or shaped -- and show the profile of a man with a long beard. The impression may have been made from a cameo of around 1550.

Style: High Renaissance
This small painting depicts a solemn religious scene. Two angels kneel in quiet contemplation next to Christ, whose body has been taken down from the Cross following his crucifixion. While the Gospels make no mention of angels alongside the dead Christ, two are said to have been present at the tomb on the morning of the Resurrection. The painting possesses monumentality, despite its reduced scale, and its intensity of feeling makes it one of Guercino’s most poignant works.

Rather than depict the dramatic events of Christ's crucifixion or resurrection, Guercino has created an imagined moment of grief and quiet reflection which evokes a powerful sense of sorrow. Naked but for the shroud which will envelop him in the tomb, Christ’s lifeless body anchors the lower half of the composition. He lies back, his head resting limply against a stone block. His face is turned away towards the angel in the centre, who looks intently at him. The other angel is overwhelmed with sadness, his eyes turned downwards and his head leaning mournfully on his hand.

Guercino has not emphasised the horror of the Crucifixion -- Christ’s wounds are barely visible and his youthful body appears luminous against the foreboding sky. A halo glimmers around Christ's head, a sign of his divinity, but his lifeless body is a reminder of his humanity as he leaves his mortal life behind.

This work is much smaller than others by Guercino, who is known primarily for his large-scale religious paintings. It was painted on copper, a material more expensive than canvas, and such pictures tend to be of reduced dimensions. They were primarily used for private devotion, and the subject of this painting, which encourages prayer and contemplation, reflects this. The copper support also gives the paint surface a fresh, textured quality -- there are areas of thick impasto, such as in the highlights on the angels’ wings, where the artist’s brushwork stands out.

Painted around 1617--18, this work is characteristic of Guercino's early style. The rich, earthy tones contribute to the soft but powerful contrast between light and shade. Although the overall colour palette is subdued, the vibrant red of the central angel's robes stands out, as does the deep grey-blue placed next to the yellow ochre on the right -- a colour combination typical of Guercino's early works.

It is not known for whom Guercino painted this work, but it is first recorded in the Borghese Collection in Rome in 1693. Many copies were made after it, evidence of its popularity. The painting had arrived in Britain by the beginning of the nineteenth century and was among the first pictures -- and the first painting by Guercino -- to enter the National Gallery's collection.

A number of preparatory drawings related to this painting exist. One explores two options for the figure of the dead Christ (National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen), while another shows the lifeless Christ with an angel by his side (the Royal Collection).

Style: Baroque, Academic
This very large painting was cut in half sometime before 1900. In 1915, the halves were rejoined in the National Gallery and some missing portions replaced.

The way the family is grouped, with clear division between male and female, is significant. Father and son are together, one writing in a book, the other reading and learning. They turn towards each other; a gesture from the father suggests that, one day, his son will inherit his role as the head of the family. The mother and three daughters are dutifully supportive, the mother still nurturing the two youngsters. The eldest girl, with the two bright red cherries, leans away, slightly apart. She is learning to become independent, ready one day to marry out of the family.

The costumes suggest a date in the 1650s. The artist was possibly familiar with painting in Delft. A stylistic resemblance between this and a portrait by Michiel Nouts (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) -- his only known signed work -- suggests it may be by him.

Style: Baroque