wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
This man is unnamed, but his clothes, his pilgrim's staff and the tiny vision of Christ's triumph over death seem to make it clear that he has been or is about to go on a pilgrimage. With large, expressive eyes, he focuses on a distant goal, the figure of Christ looking down as if watching over him. Christ, risen from the dead, strides forward from the tomb, still in the loincloth of his crucifixion, his dark hair, banner and red cloak flying out in a celestial wind.

The man's long, tapering fingers rest on his heart to denote his devotion to God. No longer young, his long face has become fleshy, his nose bony and prominent. The fair hair of a strange little moustache is shaved in the centre, parting to reveal his sensitive mouth. His cleft chin is almost hidden by a straight, goatee beard that almost looks glued on. Both are at variance with the black, luxuriant hair waving down to his shoulders.

The little icon of Christ suggests that the man was a Catholic. Protestants, especially Puritans, were discouraged from looking at such images. The man is very plainly dressed, almost in plain Puritan costume, though Catholics were unrestricted in their choice of clothes -- except when on a pilgrimage. A long journey on foot was a kind of recompense for one's sins. So the costume of a Catholic pilgrim was always plain and unadorned. On his staff hangs a gourd for water, ordained as mandatory by a pope in the Middle Ages, now adhered to as a tradition.

Since the Middle Ages, pilgrims from Flanders had made the arduous Camino de Santiago ('The Way of St James') to Santiago de Compestela in Spain. Like pilgrims from elsewhere, they wore the scallop shell on their broad-brimmed hats. Hat and shell are both absent from the portrait, so presumably that wasn't the man's destination.  Rome may have been perhaps, or Canterbury or Walsingham in England, among many others.

When the painting was first seen in England it was considered to be a portrait of John Milton, but this has since been discounted. A 1797 print of the painting is still housed at the National Portrait Gallery under the title Called John Milton. Others have believed it to be a portrait of John Bunyan, author of A Pilgrim's Progress -- the likeness is closer, and several portraits of Bunyan have, in particular, the strange little beard and sensitive mouth. But there is no proof. Bunyan isn't known to have been in Flanders, nor van der Plas in England.

As far as we know, the artist lived all his life in Flanders, the part of the Low Countries that remained Catholic after the Spanish rulers left. Only four of his signed works exist, so his life is something of a mystery, though he was master of the local guild of painters for some years. Although he has signed the picture, sadly he hasn't named his sitter. The man's finger points down to an empty scroll, probably intended to show his name. Either it remained empty or the name has faded with time.

Style: Baroque
A wine drinker -- a stout fellow with a handsome moustache -- represents Autumn in a series of paintings by David Teniers that gives each season a human form. A white sash cradles a comfortable belly, and stretched over it is a wine-coloured jacket. His fat neck disappears into the collar of his jacket and his cap is awry.

In the background, a man raises a hammer to fasten down the lid of a barrel of wine. A second, in a pink coat, attends to a barrel that has spilled grapes onto the ground. But Autumn stands with his sturdy legs apart, mouth open as if carousing, eyes perhaps a little bleary. He holds a flagon in one hand and raises a glass with a fancy stem in the other, seemingly happily ignorant of the grey clouds piling up behind him.

Style: Baroque
A number of costumed figures on horseback and on foot, distributed in different groups in the foreground, are seen beside a fountain near a forest. On the left, four women wearing long dresses seem to be busy chatting and observing the two horsemen next to them. On the right-hand side of the painting two women are walking toward a third female figure, clothed in a bright yellow dress, waiting for them at the opposite side of the fountain.

This painting is very likely a pendant to the artist’s Meeting Place of the Hunt, which is identical in size. Scientific investigation carried out by the National Gallery has demonstrated that the two works are painted on matching wooden panels, possibly from repurposed wooden drawers. Both paintings have been dated on the basis of style to about 1875--80, after the artist had returned to his native Marseille, where he spent his last years.

These imagined scenes in which elegant figures enjoy themselves in parks and gardens evoke the eighteenth-century tradition of fêtes galantes, a favourite subject for Monticelli throughout his career.  In his late paintings subject matter became subordinated to his colourful, thickly painted style. Here, however, the brushwork seems to vary in the different parts of the painting. Relatively broad and directional strokes are used in the landscape and in the sky, especially in the area surrounding the fountain. Brushstrokes become more dynamic in the figures in the foreground, which are painted in a thick impasto applied with short strokes, which gives them a three-dimensional quality.

Style: Impressionist
Jacob van Ruisdael was the foremost seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painter, and was very productive and highly successful -- there are about 20 of his pictures in the National Gallery alone. He paved the way for Thomas Gainsborough's rural scenes painted in England in the eighteenth century. Gainsborough admired and made copies of van Ruisdael's work, and owned three of his pictures. But rather than the idyllic pastoral views that appealed to Gainsborough, here van Ruisdael's vision is of a more unruly, turbulent landscape.

Van Ruisdael's familiar wind-tossed clouds are missing -- these ones pass lazily over the landscape casting shadows, the soft greys not remotely threatening. Yet there's something bleak and faintly melancholy about the picture. The ruins are close to us instead of safely in the distance, as they are in some of his other pictures, for instance, A Landscape with a Ruined Building or A Landscape with a Ruined Castle and a Church. The paint of the sky is thinly applied, the spiky trees achieved with a flickering brush but the layers of crumbling plaster and brickwork appear thicker, quickly and roughly painted with an almost impressionistic feel. Yet van Ruisdael has portrayed some architectural detail realistically. The ribs of the vaulted ceiling are almost tangible, where they curve upwards and fan out from the columns against the inner wall and, abruptly cut off, disappear into space.

We are invited through the archway, and yet there's a warning. The dog appears unwilling to follow its owner into the ruin. The little girl holding the man's hand looks up, as if enquiring why they are going into this eerie place and who is the shadowy figure on the inside. Van Ruisdael is showing us a ruin in a landscape, but he is also creating a mood and appealing to our imagination.

There is a drawing by Jan van de Velde, a Dutch printmaker and contemporary of van Ruisdael, of the ruins of the castle of Huis der Kleef just outside Haarlem (now in the Teylers Museum, Haarlem). The castle was destroyed by the Spanish in 1573, during the war in which the Dutch fought for their independence from Spain. This drawing would suggest that the castle in van Ruisdael's painting is the same building shown from a different viewpoint. But for many years the painting was known as 'van Ruisdael's Gate' or 'van Ruisdael's Arch', perhaps suggesting that it was more likely to be an imaginary building than a real one.

Style: Baroque
A woman kneels and weeps. Darkness like a great cavern surrounds her. A shaft of light picks her out on the stone steps. Behind her, huge gold columns and a tall gilded altar loom out of the shadows cast by glimmering candles. They tower up into the gloom, dwarfing the people gathered below.

Blurred figures of worshippers by the altar follow an ancient ritual, but the woman is alone in a crowd of men -- old men in black with beards, and one in red velvet with a huge, glittering turban. A gnarled hand, caught in the light, indicates her. An armed soldier grasps the fragile veil that almost slips from her bowed head. Her long hair tumbles over her shoulder onto her white shift, an undergarment -- her shame is made visible, with not even a simple robe to cover her.

The men's eyes are on a single figure. His brown robe, his red beard and long hair have become an image widely recognisable: Christ. Calm and unmoving, he looks down at the woman. He waits, as does one of his disciples with a shorn head, hand grasping his robe.

This is a moment from the story of the woman taken in adultery, as told in the Gospel of John. The Sadducees and Pharisees -- members of the Jewish ruling council -- were afraid and jealous of Christ's preaching and growing influence in the community, and planned to trick him into transgressing the Jewish law. They said to him: 'Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery. Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. What do you say about her?' (John 8: 3--7)

The tension in the group of men, Christ's thoughtful air and the woman's continuing tears suggest that Rembrandt has depicted the moment of decision that could entrap the dangerous young preacher. A man in black puts a finger to his lips, as if hushing the crowd. Will Christ plead for mercy or will he uphold the law? It seems that either way, he is condemned as well as the woman.

His reply became one of the most famous quotations in the history of Christianity. 'He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.' The woman was released, the accusers confounded. Christ was free to preach again -- but not without a parting word to the repentant woman: 'Go and sin no more.'

In seventeenth-century Holland, the Church had rejected the Catholic practice of decorating churches with  holy images and statues of saints, which for centuries had served to illuminate Bible texts for ordinary worshippers. The walls in Protestant churches were whitewashed and unadorned, but there was still a market for pictures that told stories from the Bible. The pictures told a moral tale, but the drama in them also entertained and provided a talking point. They were also a symbol of wealth but not least were they appreciated and treasured for their artistic merit. The young Rembrandt was acclaimed for his striking ability to portray drama in a way that struck to the heart.

Style: Baroque
Willem van de Velde was the leading Dutch marine painter of the later seventeenth century. This is one of his smallest paintings -- it's only about the size of a sheet of A4 paper.

In the foreground, two boats known as kagen speed shorewards before a stiff breeze. These were sturdy, flat-bottomed vessels adapted to the shallow waters of the North Sea coast, and they seem to be flying the green and white flag of Groningen in the northern Netherlands. Designed to carry passengers, they may be returning from a rendezvous with the man-of-war immediately behind, which is either setting sail or preparing to anchor. The battleship bears the arms of the Province of Holland -- the national arms in the colours used before 1663 -- and a Dutch flag flies at the stern.

We see two very different types of vessel -- one central to the day-to-day life of the coast and inland waterways, the other essential for the protection of the Dutch merchant fleet which then dominated world trade.

Style: Baroque
Wijnants shows the dune landscape close to his native city of Haarlem. The figures may have been added by another artist, possibly Wijnants’s frequent collaborator, Johannes Lingelbach.

Style: Baroque
The fires of hell light up Teniers’s cave-like underworld with an eerie glow. An old man stands, hands raised in self-defence, his eyes wide with fear at the sight of the horrors around him. Weird creatures gather in glee to welcome another soul into the dreadful place that his greed and avarice have led him to.

The story comes from the Gospel of Luke, the second of two similar parables that Christ told about the evil of gathering wealth without doing charitable deeds. This picture shows the fate of the rich man who rejected the beggar Lazarus in his last hours: while Lazarus was carried to heaven, the rich man suffered the torments of hell as a punishment. Teniers has given the man the long, 'Eastern' style robes widely thought appropriate for any biblical character, showing them as ‘purple and fine linen’ in accordance with the biblical account. These and the gold chains and rich fabrics suggest the wealth he has hoarded during his life.

The inhabitants of this underworld appear to have stemmed from the work of the great Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch, working a hundred years before Teniers, although his strange, nightmarish scenes were populated with creatures more surreal and disturbing than Teniers’s almost comic characters. They seem to be enjoying the situation: in the shadows on the left, a monkey waves a candle in the air while another blows on a recorder. Opposite them squats a grinning, grotesque figure playing the mandolin, as a strange half-fish, half-human creature opens its gaping mouth to sing. A fearsome-looking demon holds the reins to lead the old man to his fate, while a man with a candle stuck into a funnel that he wears as a hat blows on bagpipes that are actually a live goose.

Flanders was a Catholic country and the idea of hell was very real. But sins could be confessed and the sinner could receive absolution -- forgiveness for these trespasses and a guarantee of a place in heaven. This is a picture meant as a moral message, but perhaps with a light tone. Viewers could be and probably were entertained, sitting in the safety of their own fireside and picking out the various outlandish figures, while also taking in the message, although maybe not always too literally.

In The Covetous Man, painted at around the same time, Teniers has treated the subject much more subtly, bringing a rich old man close to us and in focus, with his features shown in great, almost tactile detail. He is believably an old man facing his end with a sense of real fear, and his arresting image may have more success than the melodramatic character in this picture at pointing to the moral of the tale.

Style: Baroque
We do not know who the man in this small portrait is. He's dressed in what might be black silk with black velvet facings, and he holds a pale brown glove in one hand. His clothes, the style of his hair and beard, and the angle at which his hat is worn suggest a date of around 1550.

In the early twentieth century he was identified as Antoine de Bourbon (1518--1562), King of Navarre and husband of Jeanne d'Albret, the spiritual and political leader of the French Huguenots. There are several drawn and painted portraits of Antoine, but the resemblance to this man seems very general.

That said, the condition of the painting makes it difficult to identify the sitter or to describe the portrait accurately. The paint is worn and much retouched; the surface is covered by dirt, degraded and discoloured varnishes and badly discoloured retouchings. The background would once have appeared more strongly green and the red lake pigments have probably faded.

The panel is on board of walnut. It was once bigger but has been trimmed along all four sides. Technical analysis has shown that the ground is chalk and that there is a thin priming of lead white pigment. Infrared reflectography revealed no underdrawing (the preliminary outlining of a composition). Unlike contemporary artists -- such as François Clouet, the Quesnels and the Dumoustiers -- Corneille de Lyon did not accumulate a stock of drawings to be copied and circulated. The portraits associated with him rarely show signs of underdrawing and may have been painted from life.

Style: High Renaissance
In this enormous painting, Philips Koninck shows us a panorama of the Dutch countryside under a vast sky. It was meant to bring a feeling of tranquillity but also, perhaps, a desire to explore. Without having to stir from the fireside, the picture's owner could follow the winding path into the far distance and discover all that the coach and horses have passed as they trundle out of the woods.

Koninck draws the eye towards the horizon, beginning with the glint of the sun on water close to us. Here, road and stream are together, the road in the middle distance crossing a bridge. We follow them on either side of a flat piece of land, before they join a little further on; now together, they appear to meander away towards the bend in a sparkling river many miles away. Once he has established this distance, it seems that Koninck allows the eye to wander back and find the many details he placed in the landscape. What seems an almost deserted stretch of land is actually peopled with many figures: the women washing clothes in the stream, a man fishing, a small figure brandishing a stick as he rides a make-believe hobby horse.

On the road to the left is the hawking party. Coming round a bend near a grassy mound topped with scrubby bushes, an elegant man in a feathered hat points away across the countryside. Beside him, a woman in a white bonnet and shawl rides side saddle. In front of them, a servant carries their hooded hawks on a frame hanging from his shoulders, one bird fluttering its wings to keep balance as he strides along. Far behind them, beyond another couple on horseback, a second servant hurries along to catch them up. A hawk sits on his wrist and his dogs run beside him.

Between the hunting party, the rumbling coach and the distant river there are houses among the trees and a strange chalky white village almost sketched in. Stubby trees line the road and riverbanks, and tiny boats sail on yet another stretch of water. Although the landscape is flat -- as Holland is -- this isn't a real view, but one imagined by Koninck and of a kind appreciated in a busy household as a restful and engaging image.

The characterful little figures in the painting weren't painted by Koninck, but probably by his colleague Jan Lingelbach. To have another artist paint figures, perhaps drapery or other details that were not your forte, was common practice among painters in the Netherlands at the time and in no way detracted from the quality or appreciation of the picture.

Style: Baroque
The specific subject of this picture has not been identified. Four figures that seem to be dressed in costumes of the era of Henry IV, around 1600, are shown busy in conversation. Although the picture is signed at the bottom left corner and it is the type of painting favoured by Monticelli, its authenticity has been doubted on stylistic grounds. Not only are the forms more defined, but the colour palette is untypical of him.

Technical analysis by National Gallery conservators appears to confirm this observation. In fact, both the panel support of the painting and its technique, with the surface completely covered with paint, are not characteristic of Monticelli. Unsurprisingly, considering he was highly regarded by his contemporaries, his work was widely imitated. This picture was possibly painted by an artist following his style in the 1870s.

Style: Impressionist
A stout little figure in widow's dress peers out from behind a saint's leg. This is Oradea Becchetti, and she is being presented to the Virgin and Child by Saint Francis. The painting was the central panel of an altarpiece made for a family chapel in the Franciscan church at Fabriano, in the Italian Marches.

Oradea founded the chapel in accordance with the will of her husband Giovanni and was clearly proud of what she had achieved: the inscription along the base states that she paid for the altar and painting 'at no small expense of her own money'. Both words and image suggest a formidable character. Crivelli has conveyed both her piety -- she holds a string of prayer beads -- and the determined set of her mouth and jaw.

Oradea and her husband were members of the Fabriano nobility and both from devout families. Her name means 'pray to god', while Giovanni's relatives were prominent clerics and friars. The saints, chosen by Oradea and her spiritual advisers, reflect her and their interests. St Francis of Assisiwas the founder of the Franciscan Order and patron of the church. He points to a tear in the side of his habit, showing the stigmata -- wounds mimicking those of Christ, also visible on his hands and feet. Opposite him, the muscular and almost naked Saint Sebastian -- his pubic hair startlingly visible -- seems oblivious to the arrows which pierce him. As a soldier Sebastian was popular with medieval aristocrats, but he was also seen as a 'plague saint', able to protect people from the disease. The Becchettis must have been worried about plague, successive waves of which ravaged the Marches in the late fifteenth century. Their chapel was dedicated the Virgin Mary in her guise as Santa Maria della Consolatione, the Virgin of Consolation, who was particularly associated with protection from the plague.

Mary is shown as both a loving mother and Queen of Heaven. She sits on a marble throne, with a cloth of honour behind her and vases of flowers beside her -- lilies and roses, standing for her purity and gentleness. Flowers are scattered at her feet and luscious fruits -- Crivelli's trademark -- hang from the throne. The snail by Francis's foot may even have been understood as a symbol of Christ's birth to Mary, as snails were thought to reproduce asexually. But this out-of-place mollusc might just have been a trick of Crivelli's -- he loved playing games with viewers, suggesting that his paintings were both flat and three-dimensional. Here it's not quite clear if the snail is meant to be in the painting or crawling over the surface of it.

As well as gaining credit for Oradea and her family in heaven, the altarpiece aimed to raise money for the friars who ran the church. Indulgences -- a way to reduce time spent in purgatory -- were offered to people who gave donations on feasts of the Virgin and Saints Francis and Sebastian.

Crivelli signed the painting on the cartellino along the bottom of the throne: CAROLI CRIVELLI VENETI MILES 1491. He was knighted in 1490 by Ferdinand II of Naples and although he always signed in Latin, he was no Latin scholar. Here he has used the wrong case for miles ('knight').

Style: Early Renaissance