wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
The Christ Child sits on his mother’s lap holding her hand and smiling at us. His cousin, the young Saint John the Baptist, stands grinning behind the Virgin. The group is seen slightly from below. The happy, exuberant expressions of the children contrast with the pensive mood of the Virgin, who holds her son in her arms and looks downward. Christ’s right hand is raised against his mother’s chest in an implied gesture of blessing towards us, as if the movement comes naturally to him and he does not yet realise its significance.

There is another version of this composition, virtually identical in size, in the Art Institute of Chicago. Technical evidence from X-ray images suggests that both paintings were made in the same workshop from the same cartoon, or preliminary drawing. Infrared photographs show that both pictures were traced from the same full-scale study and that identical changes were made in the underpainting of both versions. Changes in the position of the Virgin’s thumb in relation to the Christ Child’s lower lip are common to both pictures. The fingerprints on both panels, particularly in the blending of the paint in the Madonna’s face, suggest that the same artist carried out both works. The panel in Chicago appears to have been left unfinished, as it lacks some modelling and the final glazes. The National Gallery’s painting is more highly finished, with more thickly layered pigment covered with glazes, and it is better preserved. It is likely that both paintings were painted side-by-side at the same time, rather than one being a copy of the other.

The cult of the Madonna was particularly popular in Italy, resulting in a huge demand for such paintings. The Virgin and Saint John the Baptist were especially venerated in Florence, as they were patrons of the city, and images of them were constantly being produced.

The figures have a similar appearance to those in works by the Florentine Mannerist artist Pontormo, with oval faces, deep-set round dark eyes and curly red hair. It is possible that the same model was used for the Virgin here as for the crouching bearer in the foreground of Pontormo’s altarpiece  The Deposition of about 1526--8 in the church of Santa Felicità in Florence. Saint John the Baptist is closely based on the Saint John in Andrea del Sarto’s destroyed Madonna of Porta Pinti, known from a surviving preparatory drawing now in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. However, it is unlikely that Pontormo himself painted these panels; they were probably produced by an artist in his workshop or a follower of his style.

Although the sixteenth-century art biographer Vasari only named Bronzino as working in Pontormo’s workshop he also says that Pontormo would not allow his young assistants to touch his own works, suggesting that Pontormo employed other artists as well. The Art Institute of Chicago has attributed the paintings to a follower of Bronzino. They have also been attributed to the Florentine painter Maso da San Friano (1536--1571).

Style: High Renaissance, Mannerist
This is an affectionate portrayal by Murillo of one of his most devoted patrons, Don Justino de Neve. The inscribed tablet on the pilaster reveals that the portrait was made in 1665, when Justino was 40 years old, and that it was a gift from the artist -- a gesture of friendship.

Justino was born in Seville in 1625, the son of a prosperous Flemish merchant, Juan de Neve, and a Spaniard, Sebastiana de Chaves. A coat of arms in the background combines the arms of the Neve family on the left and those of the Chaves on the right. Justino was ordained as a priest in 1646 and became a canon of Seville Cathedral in 1658. He was a well-respected churchman of considerable wealth, renowned for his charity, piety and devotion to learning.

Murillo's regard for his friend is obvious in the sympathetic way he presents him: his formal pose indicates his status but his intelligent gaze is not intimidating. Dressed in a black ecclesiastical cloak, Justino leans forward slightly as if momentarily interrupted from prayer, his finger marking his place in the small book he holds. He sits in a wooden chair upholstered in crimson velvet, in a room with a view of the terrace and landscape beyond. A delicate silver bell, an ornate clock -- the time indicates that Justino is nearing the end of mid-afternoon prayer -- and a larger book, alluding to his scholarly interests, rest on the table. A plump 'toy' dog with a ribbon and bells on its collar gazes devotedly up at him.

There are echoes of this work in another Spanish portrait in our collection, Queen Mariana of Spain in Mourning, which was painted by Velázquez's son-in-law, Juan Bautista del Mazo, in 1666.

Justino was an avid art collector and owned 18 paintings by Murillo, including The Infant Saint John the Baptist with the Lamb, now in our collection. He also secured an important commission for Murillo: the decoration of a series of canvases for the church of Santa María la Blanca in Seville. This portrait was painted in the same year as the church’s inauguration, suggesting that it was intended to show Murillo's gratitude for the support he had received. Justino also oversaw several other commissions, notably Murillo's series of nine paintings for the chapter house of Seville Cathedral (1668) and other works for the Hospital of the Venerables Sacerdotes (1670s), an institution for poor and retired priests, founded in large part by Justino himself. On Justino's death in 1685 this portrait was bequeathed to the Hospital, where it remained until the early nineteenth century.

Murillo painted far fewer portraits than he did religious subjects, though we are fortunate enough to own the artist’s Self Portrait from about 1670.

Style: Baroque
This grand country house  has been identified as Kasteel d’Ursel in Hingene on the border between the old Duchy of Brabant and the County of Flanders. It was the private summer residence of the Duke of Ursel, a powerful aristocrat from nearby Antwerp and it still exists, though it has changed significantly through modifications made in the eighteenth century. Its original appearance can be seen in Flandria Illustrata (1641), a publication containing descriptions of the main towns and villages of the county of Flanders.

Lucas van Uden mostly lived and worked in Antwerp, though he also visited Brussels and other nearby towns. The landscape is thought to have been painted by van Uden, but the figures were probably done by David Teniers the Younger, who is famous for his scenes of peasants making merry. Teniers and van Uden worked together on other occasions and collaborations of this kind were common at the time.

Style: Baroque
This portrait was once attributed to Rembrandt, whose false signature it bears. The predominantly brown colours, the neutral background, the thick brushstrokes on the cuffs and handkerchief and the way that the artist has used layers of paint to depict, for example, flesh tones, are reminiscent of Rembrandt’s style. The false signature was no doubt added as an attempt to increase the painting’s value.

More recently an attribution to Willem Drost, one of Rembrandt's pupils between 1650 and 1654, has been suggested on the grounds of style, but there's no definitive evidence which proves this. The handkerchief was a common item held by women in portraits of the time -- see, for example, Rembrandt’s Portrait of Margaretha de Geer, Wife of Jacob Trip. The book on which she rests her hands, with either brass or gold claps locking the covers together, is an expensive tome, and may well be a Bible.

Style: Baroque
This painting and Portrait of a Woman aged about 45, both painted in oil on board, 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 male portrait are unlike those in Boxall's Self Portrait at the Age of Nineteen, and he never married. It is now thought more likely that this is an early portrait by Boxall of his father. The companion female portrait probably shows Boxall’s mother.

The man appears to be in middle age with a peppering of grey in his close-cropped hair and the stubble on his chin. His hair is suggested by loose brushstrokes of grey and white that appear to be painted wet-in-wet, merging with the edge of the face. Boxall's Self Portrait at the Age of Nineteen reveals a similar wet-in-wet technique for painting the hairline. The eyebrows and around the eyes in the Portrait of a Man aged about 45 have also been painted wet-in-wet to create a soft, indistinct focus which adds subtlety to the expression.

It is not clear whether the man is standing or sitting. The white form held in his hands is not clearly defined and it is difficult to work out what it is. He may be holding a large sheet of paper, perhaps a broadsheet newspaper or drawn plans. He wears a black frock coat and a pale blue-grey waistcoat with a white shirt, and a white stock tied at his neck. The background is very dark and is damaged in places. The upper right-hand side of the background may have once been red, as areas of colour can be seen through the now cracked darker surface. This portrait may have once appeared more like its companion painting, which has a sweep of red in the background. The man's portrait is now almost monochrome, placing all of the emphasis on his face and hands, to which our attention is drawn by the bright white stock and white object he holds. Although this painting seems to have darkened in the background, Boxall's portraits were known during his own lifetime for being particularly sombre and gloomy, and were popular with clergymen and dignitaries.

Parts of the flesh are damaged, but it is still possible to appreciate the artist's sensitive portrayal of the sitter's features, achieved as in the companion Portrait of a Woman aged about 45, through dramatic lighting, softly blended brushwork, attention to texture and delicately placed highlights.

Style: Neoclassical, Georgian
This panel, which shows Saints Christina and Ottilia, was originally the outer face of one of the shutters of a multi-panelled altarpiece made by Cranach in 1506, one of his first and most important commissions for the electors of Saxony. The painting has since been separated from the inner face of the shutter.

Little is known about the life of Saint Christina. She was an early Christian virgin martyr, born in the third century. Her father intended her to be a pagan priestess, and surrounded her with gold statues of pagan idols -- she destroyed them after being visited by an angel who told her to embrace Christianity. When her father discovered her conversion to Christianity, he had Christina tortured: she was grilled by fire, tortured on a wheel and shot by arrows. God thwarted all of these attempts to harm her, but she was eventually beheaded. Cranach depicts her standing on the stone to which she was tied before being thrown in a river (she miraculously floated).

Saint Ottilia was born into a noble family, but her father discarded her for being a blind girl; she was taken away and raised by peasants. When she was taken to a monastery aged 12 and baptised into the Christian faith, her eyesight was restored. On discovering this, her brother brought her back to the family home, so enraging their father that he accidentally killed the boy. Ottilia miraculously revived him and then left the family once again. When her father later fell ill, she returned to him and nursed him. She is the patron saint of good eyesight and the region of Alsace. Cranach depicts her in the black robes of a Benedictine abbess; she was abbess of the convent of Hohenburg and also founded a number of monasteries. A pair of eyeballs rests on the book she holds: a representation of her God-given sight.

The altarpiece was almost certainly made for the chapel of the electors in the castle at Wittenberg. Electors Friedrich the Wise and, possibly, Johann the Steadfast are depicted in the central panel of the altarpiece as witnesses to the martyrdom of Saint Catherine. The inner face of each shutter depicts a group of three female saints.

Style: High Renaissance
Two women retrieve a baby from a basket floating in a river, while three others look on from the bank and a fourth peers around a dead tree. This is the story of Moses in the bulrushes. According to the Old Testament (Exodus 2: 5), Moses was born in Egypt, where the Israelites were enslaved. The Egyptian Pharaoh ordered all male Jewish children to be drowned in the Nile but Moses's mother set out to save her son: 'And when she could hide him no longer, she took a basket made of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and pitch: and put the little babe therein, and laid him in the sedges by the river's brink … And behold the daughter of Pharaoh came down to wash herself in the river: and her maids walked by the river's brink. And when she saw the basket in the sedges, she sent one of her maids for it: and when it was brought she opened it and seeing within it an infant crying, having compassion on it she said: This is one of the babes of the Hebrews.' Pharaoh's daughter took pity on the child, and sent Moses's sister, Miriam -- seen here watching from behind the tree -- to fetch a wet nurse. She brought her mother, who took back the baby and raised him until Pharaoh's daughter later adopted him as her own son.

The elongated proportions of the figures, facial types and the sensitive use of colour are all characteristic of Antonio De Bellis. They are also closely related to the works of his Neapolitan contemporary Bernardo Cavallino, to whom this painting was once attributed. According to the eighteenth-century biographer Bernardo de' Dominici, De Bellis was a pupil of Massimo Stanzione.

De Bellis seems to have left Naples in the mid-1650s and gone to Dubrovnik. There are two monogrammed works by him there: The Holy Family (about 1657; Madonna of Sunja, Lopud ) and The Virgin in Glory with Saints Blaise and Francis (about 1657–8; Dominican Monastery, Dubrovnik). He then probably returned to Naples and this is one of four pictures thought to date from the late 1650s, after De Bellis's time in Dubrovnik.

Style: Baroque, Academic
Still life compositions were one of the most popular genres of Dutch painting in the seventeenth century. A painter's ability to create a picture with what we now think of as almost photographic realism was highly valued, and the objects depicted were selected partly to demonstrate artistic skill in showing different surfaces and textures. Here Jan Jansz. Treck, a native of Amsterdam, has risen to the challenge of evoking the lustre of and distorted reflections in silver, pewter, glass, porcelain and eggshells as well as the complex shadows in a crumpled linen cloth.

But the choice of objects, how they were arranged and the tone or atmosphere of such paintings varied hugely. In some, a narrative or a moral might be implied and highlighted with dramatic lighting, such as in Still Life: An Allegory of the Vanities of Human Life by Steenwyck. Objects depicted might be expensive or everyday, the colours rich or muted, the arrangement relatively orderly, or apparently teetering on the verge of disaster.

Looked at in this context, we can see that this rather beautiful example has a particularly calm aesthetic. Though the blues would once have been brighter (the pigment used, smalt, has faded over time) the overall colour scheme is muted, dominated by greys, greens and browns. Only the bright red berries stand out in this otherwise almost monochrome composition.

The selection of objects also contributes to this quietened atmosphere. Very often still-life paintings featured a diverse range of objects which had obviously been gathered together for the painting. And while the montage here clearly didn’t happen by chance, there's a certain naturalism to it: we might believe that we have stumbled on the aftermath of a meal. Here is one end of a table where the plates, dishes and a flagon have been temporarily pushed to one side, together with a tall wine glass and a discarded napkin. There is only a little wine left in the glass, and someone seems to have had their fill of the berries. There aren’t many left, and only two small bird’s eggs remain in the smaller dish. A bread roll has also been left half eaten, crumbs scattered on the cloth.

One feature does deliberately undercut the naturalism: the vine entwined around the flagon was a motif particular to Treck which he used in several paintings. And a viewer from seventeenth-century Amsterdam would have known that the two blue and white dishes were not normal domestic tableware, but very expensive late Ming-period Chinese porcelain. These were exotic and highly desirable goods, just as the silver spoon and knife were of a design which had come into fashion only recently. So we can see that this is more than just a depiction of the remains of a meal -- it is a celebration of luxury typical of Dutch still lifes. Indeed, Treck had used most of the objects shown here in another painting which he made four years earlier (now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest), but there the atmosphere is much more stressful, with one of these expensive dishes balanced precariously near the edge of the table.

Style: Baroque
This view is taken from the west bank of the Tiber looking towards the Castel Sant’Angelo. The projecting stone platform on which the uniformed musicians play appears in paintings by other artists, so probably existed, whereas the arcaded building with the canopied balcony over it has not been identified and may have been the product of Vernet's imagination. The ruined remains of the ancient Pons Neronianus (Nero's Bridge) can be seen in the middle of the river.

The clock on Castel Sant’Angelo reads 8 a.m. but the light would suggest that it is actually mid-morning. The specific event depicted has not been identified but river jousts were a popular entertainment associated with important births and marriages and the visits of monarchs to cities. As Vernet shows, such events attracted crowds of spectators.

The flag at the stern of the boat at the left bears the arms of the then pope, Benedict XIV, incorporating the three vertical red stripes of his family, the Lambertini. Four large Lambertini pennants also fly from poles attached to the Castel Sant’Angelo. There is no coat of arms on the white flag of the right-hand boat, or on the blue flag of the smaller boat in between. The caps worn by the seven rowers in each boat suggest that they are artisans.

In the Trumbull sale catalogue of 1797, it was said that the painting included portraits of Vernet, his wife and her father. If so, these may be the three brightly lit figures in the right foreground. Vernet had married Virginia Cecilia Parker, the daughter of the Irishman Mark Parker, a captain of the papal navy, in November 1745. Vernet also included himself in several of his other paintings. However, the man in the rich blue costume said to be Vernet’s father-in-law looks considerably younger than Parker would have been in 1750 and the lady arm-in-arm with the gentleman in red does not resemble Mme Vernet as depicted in Vanloo’s portrait of her of 1768 (Musée Calvet, Avignon).

It has also been suggested that the man in blue is Pierre-Charles de Villette, the first recorded owner of the painting, introducing the Vernets to his elder brother, but there is no evidence that either the Marquis de Villette or his brother was ever in Rome. It is more likely that he is Louis-Jules Barbon Mancini Mazarini, Duke of Nivernais, French ambassador to the Vatican from 1748 to 1752, who commissioned two paintings from Vernet in 1750. The Duke’s extensive household included two Swiss Guards and four trumpeters, who may be those included on the platform and to the left of Vernet’s painting. If this is so, then the woman accompanying Vernet may be Hélène-Françoise-Angélique Phélypeaux de Pontchartrain, who had married the Duke in 1731.

This was one of four paintings sent from Rome by Vernet to the Paris Salon of 1750. Vernet's work was influenced by the seventeenth-century painters Claude, Poussin and Dughet, who had established the classical landscape tradition.

Style: Romantic
Two men, one old, one young, hands raised and fingers pointing, seem either to be arguing, or discussing an important issue. They are balanced by two young women, one apparently serene and detached, the other peering around the doorway. As well as the central space between them, the two pairs are also separated by a strong dividing line -- the young man’s long crook, which forms a dramatic diagonal across the canvas. The tension is palpable: clearly we are being presented with a key moment in a story, but since the picture has no surviving title we have to make an educated guess as to what it is.

It is likely to be a biblical scene, since these were the most popular type of narrative painting in Utrecht in the 1620s, and it probably comes from the Old Testament since Christ does not appear. But which story does it represent? There are very few contenders and the most likely is the story of Jacob’s marriage, which is told in Genesis. Although it is only rarely depicted, it is the best fit with what we see in this painting, and ter Brugghen painted another representation of this story (now in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne) the following year.

Jacob fell in love with his cousin Rachel and to earn her hand in marriage agreed to work as a shepherd for her father, Laban, for seven years. But, presumably under cover of the marriage veil, Laban substituted his elder daughter Leah for Rachel. When Jacob discovered the deceit the morning after the marriage, he was bitterly disappointed, as 'Rachel was beautiful and well favoured' (Genesis 29: 17). He reproached his new father-in-law, but Laban argued that the elder daughter must be married first. He compromised by offering to allow him to marry Rachel as well -- in return for another seven years work. The determined Jacob agreed, and was eventually simultaneously married to both sisters and their handmaids, and had 12 children.

This story would explain the young man’s shepherd’s crook, and his apparent disagreement or discussion with an older man over a young woman. It could represent the initial moment when Jacob asks Laban for Rachel’s hand, in which case the woman in blue must be Rachel herself. But the dinner table suggests the remains of the wedding breakfast and so, combined with the young man’s pointed finger, we are more likely to be looking at Jacob’s admonishment of Laban the morning after the wedding. In this case, the woman in blue must be Leah, and the woman in the background is most likely Rachel.

Ter Brugghen studied and painted in Rome for ten years and was heavily influenced by Caravaggio’s techniques for creating powerful pictorial dramas and his skill at depicting highly realistic detail. Here Caravaggio’s influence can be detected in the way ter Brugghen has used the remains of the meal on the table, and the silver, glass and pewter to demonstrate his skill as a still life painter.

Style: Caravaggist