wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
Five drinkers gather in the shadowy depths of a tavern in Zarauz, the Basque coastal town where the Spanish painter Joaquín Sorolla spent the summer of 1910. One, more drunk than the others, stares through watery eyes at the artist. Sorolla understood the man’s name to be Moscorra but, as the word means drunkard in the Basque language, he may have misunderstood something the locals told him. To Moscorra’s right a man pushes a glass of cider towards him, egging on the inebriate to further excess. A younger man throws a threatening glance towards  the painter so that cruel fun is heightened by suspicion and menace.

The painting is a large-scale, improvisatory and rapidly executed sketch. Paint is applied in relatively thin layers while light and shadow are precisely evoked with bold sweeps of the brush. The canvas edges abruptly cut off two figures at upper left and right; adept in photographic technique from youth, Sorolla here exploits the haphazard spontaneity of an amateur’s awkward snapshot. This is one of a half dozen such impromptu tavern scenes he painted that summer, several featuring Moscorra, as Sorolla confronted the problem of alcoholism among the Spanish underclasses, and the baleful role taverns played in their lives. Particularly satisfied with it, Sorolla chose to include The Drunkard in his second major American exhibition, at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1911.

The picture marks a turning point in Sorolla’s career. For the first time in ten years he again took up a dark theme. Throughout the previous decade he had depicted carefree urchins and elegant, carefree women and children of the upper middle class on sun-dappled beaches; such beguiling images had served to establish his international fame and considerable fortune. Around 1910, however, Archer Milton Huntington, the founder of the Hispanic Society of America, offered Sorolla the commission to paint a monumental cycle on the peoples and customs of the artist’s homeland. Vision of Spain would be installed in the Society’s New York headquarters in 1926, four years after Sorolla’s death.

Vision of Spain presented a dual challenge. Sorolla would need to depict peasants in the sometimes grim reality of their lives and, speaking to an international audience, he was called on to exploit signifiers of Spanish art he had used only sparingly in the past decade, not least the blacks, greys and browns of Velazquez’s and Goya’s palettes. The Drunkard shows the artist with a new sense of purpose gearing up to take on the challenges his commission posed. He identified a theme representative of Basque peasant life. He entered wholeheartedly into the troubled world of Moscorra where he and the drunkard exchange direct gazes. He set himself a complicated visual and psychological challenge to paint quickly, in low light, and to capture unsparingly the fetid air of a peasant dive. Here, Sorolla created one of his saddest works: a penetrating assessment of mockery, cruelty and addiction at the lower depths which is at the same time a bravura exercise in passionate and compassionate observation.

Style: Modernist
An unknown man looks out from this portrait with a self-assured stare. His rosy lips, soft eyes and pale, youthful complexion are framed by a curly white wig that falls down his back. It is held in place with a neat black ribbon, as was fashionable for wealthy gentleman of the time. His grey jacket  has an embroidered brocade trim, and he wears a crisp white shirt and cravat under it.

Carriera was not only the most celebrated pastellist of the eighteenth century, but also the most successful female artist of her generation. She used pastel crayons on paper to create soft, luminous portraits that have a luxurious appearance. A native of Venice, her international clientele -- mainly British, French and German travellers passing through on their Grand Tour -- provided her with a lifelong source of commissions. Her pastel portraits became as important a souvenir of a visit to Venice as Batoni's portraits were in Rome.

This gentleman, however, is more likely to be a Venetian sitter, since his portrait remained in that city until the late nineteenth century. Carriera probably painted his portrait during the 1720s, when she was at the height of her career: the colours are delicate and subtly blended and the sitter's facial expression hints at his character and mood. Many of her works are highly coloured, but here she has used a restricted, silvery palette. The elegant young man appears to almost blend into the background, apart from the subtle powder blue glow that surrounds him.

This is our only painting by Carriera. It is one of very few works by women artists in the National Gallery's collection, alongside paintings by Artemisia Gentileschi, Rachel Ruysch and Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun.

Style: Baroque, Rococo
This palette brings Constable’s artistic process to life. At the time he was working, the surface of a painting was expected to be smooth and the brushstrokes almost invisible. Instead, Constable increasingly used a palette knife and brushes to vary the marks and textures in his work and create an expressive surface.

Style: Regency
In 1886, Cezanne inherited and returned to Jas de Bouffan – the manor house in which he grew up – and started repeatedly painting the same set of objects in the isolation of his studio. Staging these items exactingly, Cezanne rendered them from different perspectives to interrogate their formal properties. In some ways, this marks a development on his earlier systematic treatment of landscapes: the faceted brushstrokes and ethos of construction he brought to plein air painting intensifies in the compact, tightly controlled space of the still life. With such an intense and process-driven treatment, the prosaic items attain an enduring splendour.

Here, Cezanne paints a jug and assortment of fruit on a table, draped in white fabric, with a heavy curtain hanging loosely to the left. (The unfinished Still Life with Water Jug [about 1892-3], made around the same time and on long-term loan to the National Gallery, shows similar objects in an alternative arrangement). The flat background of the present work is a mesh of subdued blues, greens, and greys, revealing little about the interior of the scene in which the still life is arranged. Yet in this otherwise coherent arrangement of objects, Cezanne introduces subtle effects of distortion. The reflective spheres of the green apples are modelled with short brushstrokes of gradated tones, investing them with a force of presence; yet their thick black outlines also seem to compress them. Similarly, the simplified, less modulated forms of the oranges seem inconsistent in the picture, appearing flatter than the swollen base of the jug, or the drapery with its contoured folds and ridges. It is as if Cezanne has brought together objects painted at different times from different perspectives. In a development from Impressionism, which valued the empirical study of a fugitive instant, Cezanne’s painting embodies in a single picture – and makes equal – multiple ways and moments of looking.

Cezanne’s equivocal perspectives also make the relationships between the objects seem somewhat unreal. The fruit in the foreground hovers precariously on the folds of the fabric; the dish bearing the stacked pile of fruit looks too high to be feasibly supported by the table; and the jug seems to rest at a slant. This defiance – or at least troubling – of the logic of gravity creates at once a powerful sense of poise and of potential collapse, as if the fruit, despite being locked in a painterly suspension, might tumble down at any minute. This tension, achieved through Cezanne’s experimental planes and perspectives, perhaps speaks to the ‘logic of organised sensations’ that he claimed was crucial to his art. It certainly contributed to the Cubist painter Pablo Picasso’s remark decades later, that Cezanne was ‘the father of us all’.

Along with other still lifes of the early 1890s, Cezanne painted another version of this picture, with a luminous blue-green palette and slightly softer modelling, in the same year.

Style: Impressionist
In 1883 Monet rented a house in Giverny, to the west of Paris. In 1890 he was able to buy the house, and in 1893 additional land which he gradually transformed into water gardens.  While these gardens took form, throughout the 1890s Monet focussed on series paintings, including views of the poplars bordering the river Epte,  and depictions of grainstacks under different light effects. His last series, Mornings on the Seine, was exhibited at the Galerie Georges Petit in 1898.  It was around this time that Monet turned attention to his gardens as subjects for painting. At first he concentrated on such motifs as the Japanese bridge, as in The Water-Lily Pond, but later moved towards more immersive treatments of the water itself, exploring the play between flowers punctuating its surface and reflections of the unseen sky and trees.

Following a series of personal tragedies, between June 1912 and August 1914 Monet hardly worked at all, but after the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 he returned to painting, believing it his patriotic duty to produce pictures.  These included a planned series of large-scale decorations featuring the water-lily pond, to accommodate which he had a new studio built in 1915-6. The day after Armistice on 11 November 1918, he pledged to present a group of these to the French State as a monument to peace. In 1927 twenty-two works were installed in the Orangerie, Paris. Other large-scale decorations, including Water-Lilies, remained at Giverny until after the Second World War.

Monet painted his decorations during the winter in his new studio, often working on several canvases at once. During the summer he painted outdoors on smaller canvases such as this. Here he is looking over the pond’s surface at an angle. At the bottom left a strip of bank is marked by a diagonal line of bright green paint; at top right a row of trees is evoked in dark green. The same green is used for the water, on the surface of which float oval lily pads, rendered schematically in shades of blue and purple. The decorative effect is heightened by circular brushwork used to create their ethereal forms, intensified by reinforcing of outlines with lighter or darker paint. Their abstract patterning is interrupted by three creamy-yellow water-lilies, tangible shapes which stand proud of the flat surface of water and leaves.

Style: Impressionist
William Holman Hunt was one of the founders of a group of English painters called the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The group was influenced by the bold colours, intricate compositions and complex messages of Italian fifteenth-century art. In the lower right of this painting, Hunt has added the initials PRB for Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

This is a scene from the life of Nicola Gabrini (1313–1354), known as Cola di Rienzo (or Rienzi). He was an Italian politician from Rome. In 1344 he led a revolt in Rome and declared himself its leader, the Tribune of Rome. He styled himself as the natural child of the Holy Roman Emperor. In fact, he was from a humble background. It was his revolt against an aristocratic elite, and his demands for the end of the powers of the Pope and for the reunification of Italy, that made him a liberal hero in the nineteenth century.

The painting is based on Rienzi, The Last of the Tribunes (1835), a novel by the British writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton. It is dedicated to Alessandro Manzoni, the father of the historical novel in Italy. Rienzi is holding his fist to the sky. He is vowing revenge for the death of his brother whom he holds on his lap. During a skirmish with their enemies, the Orsini family, he has been killed accidentally by his allies, the Colonna. In Lytton’s novel, this moment puts Rienzi on the path that leads to him becoming the ruler of Rome.

Hunt started the picture in 1848. It was a year that saw largely unsuccessful revolutions across Europe. The family of Hunt’s friend and fellow artist, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, had fled from Naples because of their advocacy of Italian unification. In his memoirs, Hunt would claim that at this time he was inspired by the ideals of freedom against oppression that swept Europe. This painting, therefore, has a revolutionary message about the overthrow of tyranny and the power of people to decide their fate.

The futile death of this young man, and its inherent tragedy, is also a theme. Rienzi’s brother lies on his sword. The hilt points out of the painting towards the viewer. He has a garland of flowers around his wrist. Flowers held meanings for nineteenth-century artists. Hunt has included two flowers, a red anemone and a blue hyacinth, that were symbols of tragedy. Also in the bouquet are daisies, which symbolised innocence. The misery of the scene is emphasised by the mourning woman and children on the hill to the left.

The painting was also revolutionary in its creation. Hunt painted much of the landscape from nature, working out of doors on Hampstead Heath. Rienzi’s face is based on drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The knight on the far left is based on drawings of his brother, William Michael Rossetti. These both link the painting to ideals of Italian reunification as well as to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Style: Realist
The classical-style pillar and red silk curtain add grandeur to this portrait of a proud-looking young man. The inscription on the balustrade to the right includes the artist's monogram and the date 1662. The first part of it, 'Cop', stands for Copenhagen, where Heimbach lived for several years in the mid-seventeenth century, serving as the court painter to Frederick III.

The sitter has not been identified, but may be a Danish merchant; the background of towers to left and shops to the right may be intended to represent Copenhagen. The painting, with its date of 1662, provides the latest recorded evidence of Heimbach's presence in the city on his first visit.

Style: Baroque
This painting records a key moment in European political history: the confirmation of the treaty which granted independence to the Dutch nation. It's also the first known oil painting to depict such a political event in a 'factual' way.

Until this painting was made, artists tended to glorify such moments, for example casting the protagonists as classical heroes in a fantasy setting. But although the figures are clearly arranged artificially, in order to allow us to see all the most important more clearly, they are depicted with lifelike portraits. And we know, from written accounts by eyewitnesses, that many of the details of the hall and its furnishings are accurately represented.

The treaty confirmed Dutch independence from Spanish rule and so marked the formal founding of a new nation. The Catholic Philip II, King of Spain, had gained control of much of the Low Countries in 1558. Ten years later the northern – mainly Protestant Calvinist – parts of the territory had begun to revolt with the aim of winning religious and national freedom. It grew into a bitter war of independence which raged for the next 40 years until a ceasefire was signed in 1609. However, around 1619 hostilities broke out again and it was not until the swearing of the Peace of Münster in 1648 that Spain formally renounced its claim on sovereignty.

The treaty was signed in Münster in Westphalia on 30 January 1648. It was ratified by Philip IV of Spain on 1 March and by the Dutch on 18 April. The final act was the swearing of the oath of confirmation in the town hall on 15 May 1648. This painting records that moment. Some 77 people are represented, and more than 20 have so far been identified, partly with the help of individual portraits painted by ter Borch at the time. Ter Borch, who was in Münster at the time and was presumably an eyewitness, also included his own self portrait on the extreme left of the front row. He is the one looking out at us with a reddish moustache and long fair hair.

The key figures are shown standing at the centre table simultaneously swearing the oath. The six Netherlandish delegates -- five dressed in black and white, one in grey edged with silver braid -- do so with their hands raised. One, Barthold van Gent, holds a paper on which the Dutch oath has been inscribed. The two Spanish delegates -- the Count of Peñaranda holds up the Spanish version of the oath -- both swear with their right hands on the Bible. In reality, the Spaniards were the first to swear, followed by the Dutch, but ter Borch has condensed the action for greater dramatic effect.

Apart from the stylised arrangement of the figures, he was careful to render the other details of scene accurately. The interior and furnishings of the hall are faithfully recreated, as are the green table cloth and the objects on the table. Some of these still survive, including the red and gold casket containing a copy of the treaty. 

Style: Baroque
The Virgin Mary, who is being crowned with a wreath of roses by two angels, stands holding the infant Christ in her arms. A man wearing the black habit, or uniform, of a Benedictine monk kneels on the tiled floor at the Virgin's feet, and holds a scroll inscribed in Latin with a prayer to her. He commissioned the altarpiece and may have belonged to the monastery in Herzebrock, Westphalia, where the painting comes from.

The monk's head is on a piece of wood that was inserted and painted in the nineteenth century. The original fragment survives in the Westphalian State Museum of Art and Culture in Münster, where other sections of the altarpiece are housed.

Style: Gothic, Early Renaissance
Constable was determined to be recognised by the Royal Academy for his monumental paintings of the Stour landscape that he'd known since he was a child, elevating the scenery of his native Suffolk to the same status as the classical landscapes of Claude and Poussin he so admired.

Stratford Mill was a water-powered paper mill on a little island in the River Stour outside the village of Stratford St Mary, about two miles west of East Bergholt, where Constable was born. This was the second of the six so-called 'six-footers' -- or six-foot-wide paintings -- which Constable exhibited at the Royal Academy between the years 1819 and 1825, the third of which was The Hay Wain.

Constable shows the paper mill in shadow, while shafts of sunlight play between the trees and on a narrow wooden gate beside the meandering river. A dying willow leans its yellowing leaves over the glassy water and we glimpse a distant sunlit farmhouse. An unladen barge is being moored to the far bank. Near the mill, a girl watches a kneeling boy cast his fishing line into the water, and it looks as though the angler to their left has just got a bite. An uprooted tree trunk lies moldering on the ground, while the dark clouds in the distance suggest showers further off.

The composition for Stratford Mill developed from an oil sketch now known as Anglers at Stratford Mill (private collection), made in the summer of 1811. Constable took the sketch with him when he settled in London in 1817. He began thinking about painting a large picture of the scene and returned to details he'd drawn in Suffolk and Essex during 1813 in his pencil sketchbook.

In a small and swiftly painted oil sketch (private collection), Constable roughed in his developing ideas for the composition of a large painting, four times its size. He followed this by making a full-scale preparatory oil sketch (Yale Centre for British Art).

Constable's finished painting of Stratford Mill was selected to hang in the Great Room at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1820, where it received generally good reviews but failed to sell. Constable's friend, Archdeacon John Fisher, who had bought Constable's A View on the Stour, 'The White Horse' (Frick Collection, New York) from the 1819 Royal Academy exhibition for himself, asked if he could buy Stratford Mill as a gift for his solicitor, John Pern Tinney. Constable agreed to sell the painting for 100 guineas, which Fisher thought too low a price.

When the painting was returned by the Royal Academy, Constable continued to work on it. Tinney eventually received Stratford Mill by mid-July 1821 but Fisher reported that in Tinney's house it looked like 'an emerald in a dish of rubbish'. To the Tinneys' annoyance, Constable borrowed the painting back three times, first so he could work on 'toning it down', then for inclusion in the British Institution's exhibition of works by living British artists, then after Tinney's death, for it to be engraved by David Lucas. Lucas's mezzotint was eventually published in 1840 after Constable's death with the title The Young Waltonians, a reference to Izaak Walton's book about fishing, The Compleat Angler, of 1653.

Style: Romantic, Regency
Turner's painting is based on the English seventeenth-century author and poet John Dryden’s translation of the Aeneid, the monumental Latin poem written by the Roman poet Virgil. Regarded as the founding epic of Ancient Rome, the poem tells the story of the Trojan prince Aeneas. Following the defeat of Troy by the Greeks, Aeneas spends years wandering with his followers before finally settling in Italy. Believing it to be his destiny to found a city, he becomes the ancestor of the Romans. During his travels, Aeneas is shipwrecked at the North African city of Carthage, whose queen, Dido, falls in love with him. After he departs for Italy without her, she kills herself in despair. Eight of Turner's 11 pictures about Aeneas relate to his association with Dido.

Aeneas’ story, with its themes of exile, destiny and the founding of a new civilisation through the creation of Rome, clearly appealed to Turner. The rise and fall of empires such as Rome and, in this instance, Carthage, was also a theme that preoccupied him for nearly forty years. He painted 10 major paintings on the history of Carthage. Although not a series, these pictures are meditations on history, and the emergence and collapse of grand human ambitions -- this painting is paired with The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire (Tate gallery, London). These grand narratives frequently concern a historical figure whose fate is subject to forces beyond their control. For Turner, the story of Carthage was also the tragic story of Dido and Aeneas.

Standing on the left and dressed in blue, Dido visits the tomb being built for her husband, Sychaeus. He had been killed by her brother, from whom she had escaped to establish Carthage which she ruled as its first queen. The man in a cloak and helmet standing before her is probably Aeneas. At this point in the story, the tragic outcome of their liaison lies in the future. Wearing a diadem and accompanied by a Black servant and young purse-bearer, Turner's Dido may have been inspired by a recent operatic production. Rather than a love-struck or doomed victim, she is a commanding figure of strength, as described in Dryden’s line: ‘Amidst the crowd she walks serenely great.'

This is the first of Turner’s paintings in which he intended to match the seventeenth-century French landscape painter, Claude, in particular his Seaport paintings. These typically include a wide stretch of water, extending to the horizon in the picture's centre, flanked by classical buildings and tall trees rising from the quay. A crowd of figures and scenes of harbour life usually complete the scene. Although Turner broadly follows Claude's model, his own painting is filled with architectural features, human activity and highly textured detail not found in Claude's more classical compositions.

In Turner’s second will, made in 1831, he specified that the picture, together with his Sun Rising through Vapour, should hang 'in perpetuity' in the then newly built National Gallery alongside Claude's A Seaport and Landscape with the Marriage of Isaac and Rebekah.

Style: Romantic, Regency