wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
The son of a marine pilot, Boudin was born in the northern French port of Honfleur and grew up in Le Havre, so he was familiar with life in harbours and along the shore. He began his artistic career as a painter of marine subjects before carving out a niche for himself with beach scenes that showed the crowds of wealthy visitors who descended on the  Normandy resorts of Deauville and Trouville each summer. There are three of these in the National Gallery’s collection: Beach Scene, Trouville (1860--70),  Beach Scene, Trouville (1873) and Beach Scene, Trouville (1870--4). However, by 1870 he was beginning to focus once again on maritime scenes, for which there appeared  to be a ready market – at least in Belgium.

In 1869 Boudin told a friend that the art dealer Léon Gauchez ‘has written to me in Brussels to say that I’m a complete success in that country. He hopes that city will become a market for me in the future.’  Boudin went on to say that Gauchez had advised him to paint carefully prepared marine scenes as he was hoping to pitch them against the works of Belgian marine artists -- something he had already tried with Boudin’s friend Jongkind. When Boudin left Paris to avoid the Franco-Prussian War in the winter of 1870--71 he chose to base himself in Brussels. While he was there he produced several paintings of the fishmarket, the canals and the small commercial port.

Boudin had already established himself as a keen observer of changing skies and weather conditions, and here the overcast sky, reflected in the still waters of the harbour, is evidence of his continuing preoccupation with atmospheric effects. He also wanted to accurately record the topography. In the numerous harbour scenes that he painted throughout his career he tried to document the individual character of each port and its shipping. He stressed the care he took over his studies, writing: ‘…I flatter myself that the future public will view them with interest for what they show of the sails, rigging, and general state of ports in our day.’

Before its canal system was expanded in the late nineteeth century, Brussels harbour was not particularly busy; this must have suited Boudin, who generally preferred more tranquil ports over bustling industrial ones. Here he stresses the picturesque quality of the buildings, barges and small boats, calmly at anchor. The receding lines of the masts lead us along the channel and into depth. The predominantly grey palette is relieved by a few touches of red and yellow. Unlike  Boudin’s beach scenes, human presence is implied rather than shown.

Style: Impressionist
This portrait has long been said to represent Geneviève Savalette, Marquise de Gléon (about 1732-1795), who was a writer and amateur actress. The dress and hairstyle date to about 1760, when Greuze had returned from Rome and was working in Paris.

Style: Rococo, Neoclassical
Two people, one draped in bright yellow and blue, take us from their high viewpoint into this dramatic landscape. A river leads from the bottom left corner, through a rocky gorge, to the lake in the middle distance, set in a valley below snow-covered mountains. A storm has broken over the peaceful meadows at the lake shore: from a swiftly moving rain cloud, a jagged shaft of lightning cuts across the sky.

We don't know whether the picture illustrates an episode from a particular narrative. The painting was once called 'The Flight of Ahab', although this story does not exist in the Old Testament. While there are similarities between this scene and the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, which according to the Book of Genesis was caused by a lightning bolt, it seems unlikely to be the subject we see here.

Millet specialised in classical landscapes, which combined observation of nature with imaginary details. The valley seen here contains a settlement with the type of Romanesque church tower found in many French villages, as well as a classical arch more often seen in Rome than in this type of rural setting. Bathed in sunlight, the foreground scene leads our eye in a zigzag across the composition and towards the valley and mountains, whose blue tones convey the fact that they are some distance away. A closer look at the painting reveals further details: the group of people climbing up the hillside; the buildings at the water's edge to the right; and the groups of trees and roads leading to further settlements in the valley and nestled in the mountains.

Millet painted this ambitious picture in the 1670s, late in his career when he was working in Paris. The subject suggests that he was familiar with works by Nicolas Poussin such as Storm (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen), which he perhaps knew through prints made after the painting. The influence of Gaspard Dughet can also be seen in the loose brushwork, sweeping path and person on horseback. However, Millet has not framed his composition with trees as Poussin and Dughet usually did. The extensive panorama seen from a high viewpoint is more reminiscent of sixteenth-century Flemish landscape painting.

Style: Baroque
The young woman in this painting is richly dressed, in a silvery green dress patterned with oak leaves. She is surrounded by a swathe of gold-bordered material, and wears a lavish floral garland.

An annotation in a 1907 sale catalogue suggested that this portrait was of a “Mlle de Coislin.” However, no other evidence exists to support this claim.

Style: Baroque, Rococo
The sitter's doublet is inscribed on the neckline: ALBERTVS. PIVS CARP [...] + MDXII ('Alberto Pio from Carpi 1512'). The inscription has been repainted, and although it may simply be a replacement of the original, the name could have been added or adapted to make the painting more appealing to a collector. The portrait does not obviously resemble the person depicted on a medal inscribed with Alberto Pio's name (British Museum, London), but it is not unlike his image in a fresco [painted by Loschi in the chapel of the Palazzo Pio in Carpi.

Alberto Pio was recognised as the legitimate ruler of Carpi, near the Italian town of Modena, in 1512; he was granted the rights over the part of the territory that had previously been controlled by Alfonso I d'Este, Duke of Ferrara. This date seems consistent with the sitter's hairstyle and costume, but in 1512 Alberto Pio was 37, older than he appears here. The sitter is presented half-length in front of a parapet flanked by two columns, with a landscape between them. The frontal pose echoes portraits of Guidobaldo da Montefeltro and Elisabetta Gonzaga (both now in the Uffizi, Florence) attributed to Raphael, made for the courts of Urbino and Mantua around 1506. The knotted decorations on the clothing have a heraldic character and are associated with the Savoia family with which the Pio family were connected.

All the writing on the pages of the book has been reconstructed, and in some places it seems to diverge from the traces of the original. The lines are the famous passage of Book VI of Virgil's Aeneid (verses 724--47): the dead Anchises explains the transmigration of souls -- in which a soul passes from one body to another after death -- to his son, Aeneas, who has visited him in the underworld. This passage was of particular interest to Christian theologians with a classical education as it showed how pagan thinkers could believe in the immortality of the soul and its cleansing after death, not unlike the purification process undergone in the Christian purgatory. The religious significance of the text and the erudite but obscure meaning of the background figures seem entirely consistent with Alberto Pio's work as a theologian as well as a classical scholar.

The book may be intended to recall a precious fifth-century manuscript belonging to Alberto Pio -- the famous Virgilio Mediceo now in the Biblioteca Laurenziana, Florence, which contained the complete works of Virgil. The symmetrically placed temples in the background are dedicated to Dionysius and to Phoebus Apollo on the twin peaks of the scared mountain Parnassus. The landscape derives from a woodcut of Parnassus by Hans Suss von Kulmbach in a text by Conrad Celtes of 1502. Celtes was poet laureate at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, so it is very likely he was known to Alberto Pio, who acted as the Emperor's ambassador. The coat in the painting may be an ambassadorial gown, perhaps one of German style, as similar loose gowns with cord fastenings appear in German paintings.

Style: High Renaissance
This painting and Portrait of a Man aged about 45 were designed to hang together as portraits of a husband and wife. They are said to have been given by the painter Sir William Boxall RA, director of the National Gallery from 1865 to 1874, to his friend, the architect James Wyatt RA (1746--1813). Wyatt’s great-grandson, H.W. Standen, presented them to the National Gallery in 1964 as a 'Self-Portrait of William Boxall and a companion portrait of his wife'. However, the features in the man's portrait are unlike those in Boxall's Self Portrait aged Nineteen, and he never married. It is now thought more likely that this is an early portrait by Boxall of his mother. The companion male portrait probably shows Boxall’s father.

The woman appears to be seated against an undefined background with what may be the red fabric of a chair or curtain behind her and an area of golden light to the left of her face. She wears a dark dress with a loosely painted diaphanous collar or shawl over her shoulders, apparently fastened with a red and gold brooch. She appears to be holding a pair of wire-framed spectacles in her lap. Her head is covered with a turban-like cap made of folded white fabric. Her face is depicted in more detail than any other part of the picture, with softly blended brushstrokes that resemble the texture and finish of a pastel drawing. The contour of her right cheek appears slightly uncertain and reworked, as though the artist has had trouble getting the line right first time.

The lady's eyes are particularly striking with bright highlights in the dark pupils, intentionally hazy outlines to soften the focus and an intimate gaze that suggests the painter was well known to the sitter. The artist has skilfully captured the varying textures of the face -- the soft down of the cheeks, the slight sheen on the bridge and at the end of the nose, the moist surface of the whites of the eyes and on the lips. The glossy curls at the lady’s forehead are suggested with great economy -- little more than patches of brown highlighted with smudges of white. There is some damage to the dark paint in the background to the right.

Style: Neoclassical, Georgian
Although apparently casually displayed, the objects in this still life would immediately have suggested wealth and extravagance to a seventeenth-century viewer. The cloths have a satin-like sheen, soft to the touch, and the objects on them are all expensive luxuries in a carefully designed display to show wealth. They also demonstrate Heda's skills in painting textures, objects projecting out of the picture towards us and subtle, rich colours.

The objects have been chosen not just because they are rare and precious -- they also show how Dutch merchants brought  exotic items from far-flung parts of the globe. The olives and lemons come from the Mediterranean, the blue-and-white porcelain dish from China and the peppercorns from the East Indies. Other items originate in the Dutch Republic but were still very expensive: the lobster, the stand supporting the roemer (the stubby glass with florets on the stem) and the elaborately crafted gold goblet with a Roman warrior, possibly the god Mars, on top. The waterfowl perched on the terracotta pot hints at the dish inside it, but is also -- wings open in an impressive display -- a visible symbol of affluence. Grains of rock salt are shown glittering like jewels in a silver holder.

Such displays of wealth  were sometimes a reminder of the transience of earthly belongings, but they are certainly evidence of the lavish lifestyles of Dutch merchants during the seventeenth century. But there is perhaps a hint of time passing. The peppercorns have been tipped from a crushed paper tube, which started out as a cone. This was the usual method of parcelling up spices and in paintings sometimes, as in this case, made from a page taken from an almanac. Heda shows it in this picture as trashed, reminding the viewer of its ephemeral nature. In another painting, Still life: Pewter and Silver Vessels and a Crab, the almanac cone is pristine, but the peppercorns still spill out.

Heda's ability to represent real objects in paint is clear -- things gleam, reflect, or glow. The light, coming mainly from the left, catches the bird's wing; two quick stokes of the brush reveal a tall flute glass almost invisible against the dark background. In several places, light reveals wine or water seen through glass (an artist's skill in showing this phenomenon was particularly valued at the time). Two pewter plates project over the edge of the table, while the tube containing a scroll and a carving knife point away from us on diagonal lines, demonstrating Heda's command of perspective in different ways.

Embroidered on the tablecloth is a cipher that seems to refer to a merchants' guild, perhaps implying that the painting was commissioned by  such a guild. The handsome red lobster with the beady eye, placed with such prominence, perhaps suggests a connection with the sea as the source of their wealth.

Style: Baroque
An ageing man looks affably out at us, a hint of a smile on his lips. The cassock, collar and skull cap (known as a ‘zucchetto’) he wears indicate that he is a priest, though his identity is unknown. He is shown standing, in three-quarter length, his head and left hand starkly lit against a plain background. The portrait is astonishingly direct and we have a real sense of the priest’s physical presence -- not just through his pointed stare but also because the strong lighting brings his lifelike features sharply into focus.

Formerly thought to be by the Venetian artist Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, this painting is now attributed with certainty to the Lombard painter Giacomo Ceruti and is datable to the 1720s, when he was active in Brescia. Ceruti was an accomplished portraitist, representing his sitters with remarkable sincerity, but he also enjoyed considerable success as a painter of genre and low-life scenes – beggars, street-sellers and vagabonds (‘pitocchi’ in Italian) – which earned him his nickname ‘il Pitocchetto’.

Style: Baroque, Rococo
Justice sits between two lions and looks down at her golden scales. The lion of Saint Mark is a symbol of Venice, so she may represent Justice in that city. Her scales weigh right from wrong and her sword punishes the guilty. Beside her, a golden shield is painted with the coat of arms of the Contarini del Zaffo, an important Venetian family.

The painting is likely to have been made for a public building in Venice or the Veneto for which the Contarini family had some responsibility. It may have been painted for the Venetian mint, the building in which the Venetian currency was struck and regulated. Tommaso Contarini was Superintendent (Provveditore) of the mint from 1542, when Salviati was in Venice.

Its arched form indicates that it originally filled a semicircular architectural space, called a lunette. It was intended to be displayed high up, perhaps hung above a door, or to fill some similar space. Additional painted canvas has been added to all sides except the lower edge, and it is likely that the crescent moons and the lion on the left were not included in the original painting.

The figure of Justice is designed to be seen from below. The artist has achieved this effect by adjusting her proportions, using a technique known as foreshortening. Giuseppe Salviati would have been practised at this technique from his experience in the decoration of ceilings and the outside walls of palaces.

The varnish, perhaps always tinted, has now darkened and discoloured, obscuring many of the original colours. The sky was probably painted with the pigment smalt, which has since turned brown. The dark lines in the sky behind Justice are part of the underdrawing, now visible through the paint which has become translucent over time. The underdrawing was made with a brush and dark paint. It is possible to see that Justice's left arm was originally raised, holding up the scales. The new lower position of her arm continues the elegant spiral pattern created by her floating veil, shoulder strap and folds of her gown, which draw our eyes, like Justice's own, to her golden scales.

Style: High Renaissance
This picture captures a pivotal moment in a story taken from the Book of Genesis (24). Abraham had sent a servant to his homeland to find a bride for his son, Isaac. The servant came to a well, and waited for a woman kind enough to provide both him and his 10 camels with water: this woman would be the perfect bride for Isaac.

In the painting, an elegantly dressed woman looks calmly at the servant, her hand resting on a water pitcher -- she seems only a little surprised at his request. This is Rebecca, Isaac's future wife, who drew water for the servant and all of his animals. The servant offers her several pieces of jewellery as a reward for her kindness, which spill out of the open box in front of him. Pellegrini has emphasised Rebecca's luminous, pale skin and the golden curls of her hair, which contrast with the tanned complexion of the balding servant.

Pellegrini's characteristic use of long, energetic brushstrokes and his confident application of paint can be appreciated in the bunched-up folds of Rebecca's blue dress and cream bodice and in the servant's deep red drapery, which add a vibrancy and rich texture to the scene. The handle of the pitcher has been described in just a few strokes, and the stone face in the bottom-right corner built up in loosely applied paint. The woman and the hairy camels just behind the main figures are also painted with freely applied strokes of paint, but in slightly paler tones and in thinner layers, giving the impression that they are further away. Thinner still are the layers of paint that describe the pinkish cloudy sky.



Pellegrini, the brother-in-law of Venetian portraitist Rosalba Carriera, travelled to England in 1708 and established himself as one of the most sought-after decorative painters in Europe. He stayed for five years and this picture was probably painted during that time. Shortly after he travelled to Düsseldorf where he was commissioned to produce a series of large decorative paintings. A preliminary sketch for one of them is in the National Gallery's collection: An Allegory of the Marriage of the Elector Palatine.

Style: Baroque, Academic
Within a walled garden, a man wearing a striking blue costume and ornate necklace catches the gaze of a woman holding a jar. A young boy stands just behind her, carrying a spear. Beyond the wall we glimpse treetops and birds flying across a bright sky.

This picture is part of a series of four paintings that once decorated a room in the Palazzo Cornaro on the Campo San Polo, Venice. The pictures are based on Torquato Tasso’s epic poem Jerusalem Delivered which is set during the First Crusade, a Christian military campaign to recapture Jerusalem from Islamic rule. The poem tells of the ill-fated love between the Saracen sorceress Armida and Rinaldo, a Christian knight. Another painting from the series, Rinaldo turning in Shame from the Magic Shield shows the moment in which Armida's spell is broken and Rinaldo resolves to return to war. The woman in this scene may represent Armida who, left heartbroken by Rinaldo’s sudden departure, decides to join the fight against the Crusaders. The exotically dressed man sitting at her feet is probably Adrastus, an Indian prince who vows to tear out Rinaldo’s heart to satisfy Armida’s desire for revenge.

The figures’ twisted poses create a sense of movement within the picture, and Tiepolo’s lively brushstrokes add vibrancy to the wonderful fabrics and patterns on display.

Style: Baroque, Rococo
Philippe Rousseau is best known now as a still-life painter, but early in his career he painted a series of landscapes in such places as Normandy and Brittany; it was with a Normandy view that he made his debut at the Salon in 1834. This landscape dates from later in his life. The view is along a sunlit valley under a bright sky. While the actual location has not been identified, the hillside at the left, which is divided into strips of small fields or kitchen gardens, can be compared to  Pissarro's views of the same period painted in and around the village of Pontoise to the north-west of Paris, for example Jalais Hill, Pontoise (1867, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). A couple of strips are planted with rows of vegetables, perhaps cabbages, and one towards the left is sprinkled with the red of what must be poppies. While hinting at man’s work, Rousseau otherwise excludes human presence.

The high horizon, which became a popular device in the later nineteenth century, was also employed by artists such as Millet,  Rousseau (see his A Rocky Landscape)  and by Corot  in his earlier views of the Morvan region, such as Peasants under the Trees at Dawn.

The technique varies considerably across the canvas. The foreground is much more sketchily and thinly painted, with a brown underlayer, possibly a ground, showing through. The fresh cool tonality of the greens, achieved by the addition of a fair degree of white, and the broad fluid brushwork, set the view apart from many Barbizon School landscapes of the same period. Its freely painted technique can be compared to that of the early Impressionists.

Style: Realist