wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
The grim story of the beheading of Saint John the Baptist is recounted in the Gospel of Mark. John had preached against King Herod for marrying Herodias, the wife of his own half-brother, and was imprisoned for the offence. During a banquet, Herod's stepdaughter Salome danced so beautifully that the King promised to grant her any wish. Following her mother’s instruction, Salome demanded the Baptist’s head on a platter.

Although appalled by the request, Herod gave the order for John’s beheading. Stom has depicted Salome, shown in strict profile at the right, receiving the severed head -- the executioner dangles it high over the platter that she holds up. John's brightly lit face emerges from the murky shadows, so it's not immediately obvious that his head is no longer attached to his body. A boy in the foreground thrusts a torch forward, providing stark illumination and adding to the theatrical impact of the scene.

The characters in Stom’s painting display a whole spectrum of emotions. The bearded executioner is clearly a ruthless man, but his facial expression suggests that even he is slightly repulsed by Salome’s gruesome demand. The old maidservant standing next to Salome seems shocked at the sight of the head hanging in front of her, raising a hand in defence. Salome, by contrast, is staring at the saint's head without fear; her flushed cheeks and shining eyes might even speak of excitement. The young boy with wide eyes and open mouth has removed his beret in a gesture of respect to the dead man.

Stom, who was probably of Flemish origin, painted at least two other versions of the subject (Musei di Strada Nuova, Genoa; National Museum of Fine Arts, Valetta). This is an early work and might have been painted in Rome, where Stom is recorded in 1630 and where he must have studied the work of Caravaggio closely. The story of John the Baptist’s death held a morbid fascination for Caravaggio and his followers and, just like these painters, Stom has combined a dramatic use of lighting with the realistic observation of human emotions.

This painting is first recorded in London in 1779, having being acquired by James Harris, a philosopher, politician and collector. But it was probably already in England in around 1640, when the English portrait painter William Dobson copied it. Dobson’s picture (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) is the only seventeenth-century English painting in the style of Caravaggio, and it attests to the taste for Caravaggist paintings in England at this early date. James Harris described the painting as ‘undoubtedly Italian’ but when it was sold at auction in 1950 it was attributed to Gerrit van Honthorst, a Dutch follower of Caravaggio who might have been Stom’s teacher.

Style: Caravaggist
This man with his shrewd and slightly suspicious expression has been identified as Vincenzo Morosini (1511--1588), a powerful Venetian official. He appears in two other paintings in Venice by Tintoretto: a large ceiling canvas in the Doge's Palace, inscribed with his name and dated 1580; and in the altarpiece for his family chapel in the church of S. Giorgio Maggiore. The National Gallery's portrait was probably made as a studio model for both paintings. Vincenzo Morosini may have had a special admiration for Tintoretto. In 1648, the art biographer Carlo Ridolfi recorded that Morosini owned a Virgin and Child, a Vulcan, and a picture of Saint Lawrence, all by Tintoretto.

Vincenzo Morosini belonged to one of the oldest, proudest and richest families of Venice. In 1565 the Senate elected him as one of the chief counsellors of the mainland territories of Venice, a very senior post with military and financial responsibilities. In 1571 during the War of Cyprus he was put in charge of the defence of the Venetian Lagoon against the threat of Turkish invasion.

In 1572, he was sent to represent the Venetian state at the Coronation of Pope Gregory XIII. It was probably then that he was made Cavaliere of the Stola d'Oro (Knight of the Golden Stole). This was a special Venetian honour bestowed by the Senate and represented by the golden embroidered band that Morosini wears over his shoulder in this portrait.

Vincenzo was elected to oversee the reconstruction and redecoration of the Doge's Palace after the fires of 1574 and 1577 and, in 1578, he became one of the nine procurators of Saint Mark's, which was the most coveted office after that of doge. He was buried in the church of S. Giorgio Maggiore in 1588, the monastery of which had been founded by his ancestor, the Blessed Giovanni Morosini, in 982.

Tintoretto depicted with sympathy the wrinkled flesh, veined foreheads, thin beards and watery eyes of the old men who ruled Venice. In this portrait study, among his most sensitive, Morosini's face is carefully composed of many paint layers, while his clothes are rapidly dashed-in. Rough streaks of lead-tin yellow imitate the gold threads on the stole, which is painted on top of the crimson robe. The white fur lining of Morosini's gown has a pink tinge in places where it was applied over crimson paint that was still wet. As the pale blue-green paint of the hills has become more transparent, the dark underpaint, or ground, beneath has appeared. When analysed under a microscope, the ground appears to have been made from a mixture of leftover paint scrapings from the palette for another painting. If the portrait was painted as a studio model for other paintings, its shape and lesser details wouldn't have mattered so much.

The present shape of this portrait is unusually narrow, and it may have been trimmed along the right-hand side -- Morosini's arm and the landscape have been awkwardly cut. The sky and landscape originally extended further to the left but were then partly concealed by the dark wall Tintoretto painted over them.

Style: High Renaissance
Saint Catherine of Alexandria sits at a table reading a book. On either side of her are two angels: one holds Catherine's traditional attribute of the spiked wheel on which she was tortured for her Christian faith, the other holds a martyr's palm.

The picture is a later version of a painting by Bernardino Luini, who was a follower of Leonardo and repeated his themes. The facial type of Saint Catherine is derived from Leonardo’s work, as is the soft, hazy approach to modelling and lighting seen here, known in Italian as sfumato (literally ‘smoky’). Forms emerge from the darkness and contours are blurred, creating a sense of ambiguity, especially in the figures’ expressions. Saint Catherine looks down at her book and seems to smile quietly to herself. The painting’s contemplative mood is enhanced by the rich deep colours and plain dark background.

There is another version of this composition in the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. Both at different times have been thought to be the original.

Style: High Renaissance
The focus of this large altarpiece is the tiny infant Christ -- he lies on the ground, his head supported by a small cushion. His mother, the Virgin Mary, kneels behind him, surrounded by angels. Also gathered in worship are Mary's husband Joseph and, to the left, four shepherds.

The shepherds appear only in the Gospel of Luke, which describes how they saw a vision of the angel of the Lord who told them the news of Christ's birth. Signorelli has depicted this event on the hillside to the left of the picture. Under the natural rock arch on the right, a man wearing a wreath plays the bagpipes. He is probably a shepherd too: they were traditionally shown seated on the ground playing the instrument (see The Angel appearing to Saint Joachim for another example).

In the background, immediately behind the angels, a group of people gather in an open structure that resembles a Roman temple, with columns and a pediment. If you look closely, you'll see a row of figures behind a bench who seem to be scribbling notes. This is probably a reference to the opening verses of Luke's nativity story, which describes how Caesar Augustus, the Roman Emperor, had ordered all citizens of the Roman Empire to enrol in a census for taxation (Luke 2: 1--5).  The scene is rare in images of the Nativity, but it was the motivation for Mary and Joseph to travel to Bethlehem, where Christ was born.

Vasari describes how Signorelli made this painting 'with love and design'. Design ('disegno') was a crucial aspect of Renaissance painting in central Italy, where painters were more concerned with drawing than with colouring.  The underdrawing of paintings was often very detailed, and there were many preliminary drawings. Signorelli's study for the group of shepherds is at the British Museum. It is covered with a grid, probably to help him copy it to scale for the painting; specks of green paint on the paper suggest that he had it close to hand as he was painting.

The semicircle of adoring figures is carefully arranged to draw our attention to Christ; you can follow the standing shepherd's gaze down his staff to the face of the second kneeling shepherd, who is looking towards the infant. Signorelli trained with Piero della Francesca whose interest in mathematics and geometry is reflected in this careful arrangement of the figures. He has also paid attention to detail -- the delicately painted flowers in the foreground include a clump of wild strawberries, symbolising the fruitful and righteous life of Christ.

Signorelli has signed his name on the building where the census is taking place: LVCE . DE CORTONA. P.[ICTORIS] O.[PUS], ('work of Luca of Cortona, painter').

Style: Early Renaissance
This exhilarating scene shows the annual regatta (boat race) along Venice's Grand Canal, an event which drew crowds of Venetians and foreign visitors and continues to this day. Canaletto has successfully captured the crowd's excitement as the competitors skilfully manoeuvre their craft (battelli) up the middle of the canal -- you can almost imagine their roar, drowning out the splashing of oars.

Many of the figures in the foreground have their backs to us. Most stand in a state of suspense, arms raised, a masked figure in a black cape waves a white cloth or handkerchief in encouragement, while others point towards the boats. Wealthy Venetians sit in their large, colourful rowing boats, or bissone, while ordinary folk occupy an array of smaller vessels.

This picture was painted in about 1735. The scene was obviously popular among Canaletto’s clients as he returned to the subject many times, including a later version in the National Gallery's collection. Painted around 1740, he made slight changes to the composition to achieve a better sense of the scale and atmosphere of the famous race. Even within these short years, there was considerable development in Canaletto's style and the breadth of his artistic invention. Particularly striking are the changes to the way he paints people -- there are considerably less of them in this picture and they are depicted in a more hurried style, losing definition as our eye moves further back. For the later version, he adopted a more mechanical and refined approach, focusing on crisp, intricate details and the vivacity and variety of these figures, with precise dots of paint to describe the receding crowds.

Here, as in the later painting, the sharply receding view intensifies the drama of the race: we feel like we're watching the boats speed away. This is further emphasised by the bright sunlight that hits the sides of the houses to the right and picks out each window and balcony to the left, some displaying brightly coloured cloths and almost all tightly packed with spectators. In this earlier picture, we are closer to the action and to the glorious floating pavilion, or Macchina della Regatta, on which spectators in ordinary dress and carnival attire have gathered, positioned at the volta del Canal, the bend in the canal where the races ended.

Luca Carlevarijs, one of Canaletto's early rivals, established the standard composition for depictions of regattas and both of Canaletto's pictures were clearly inspired by The Regatta on the Grand Canal in Honour of Frederick IV, King of Denmark and Norway (The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles), painted in 1711.

Style: Baroque, Rococo
The 12 small pictures in this group show the 'labours of the months' -- the activities that take place each month throughout the farming year. They were painted on canvas and then each glued to a wooden panel. It is possible that they were made to decorate the recessed panels of a pair of doors. The paintings seem to have been planned in pairs with the figures facing each other and are currently displayed in two frames in groups of six.

In this painting, which we think may represent April, a cooper makes a wooden barrel. He raises his mallet ready to strike the tool in his other hand. The work must be physically hard as he has tied a band of white cloth around his forehead to keep the sweat out of his eyes. The barrel will be used to store wine made from the grapes we see being pressed in September.

Style: High Renaissance
A large gathering of Israelites worship a life-size statue of a golden calf, or what is actually a golden bull, that represents the Egyptian bull-god Apis. They have decided to worship a different, pagan god while their leader Moses has been away on Mount Sinai collecting the stone tablets on which God has written the Ten Commandments, his laws on how to live properly.

Aaron, dressed here in a white cloak, has melted down gold earrings to create the statue. In the top left corner, Moses returns with his successor Joshua, and in his anger at seeing the calf smashes the stone tablets (Exodus 32: 19).

The worshippers dance energetically and we follow their pointed hands across the canvas, which helps to tell the story. Our eye is drawn to the group of kneeling figures on the right, who gaze and point towards the altar, and to the group of dancers on the left with Moses behind them. These two groups are connected by the dancing girl who links hands with another dancer and holds a small bunch of white flowers. The group of tents on the right show that worshippers have travelled a long way to reach this shrine. Several people in the middle distance look in shock at what Moses is doing. A bright light shines onto the scene from our direction; an elderly man in front of the tents shields his eyes.

This picture shows Poussin's interest in classical antiquity: the muscular physique of the worshippers, the flowing drapery and frieze-like arrangement of the dancers are inspired by antique sculpture. Groups of dancers at pagan festivals are often found on ancient Greek vases. The boldly coloured clothing and golden sky reflect the influence of sixteenth-century Venetian painters such as Titian and Bellini. Poussin spent his time in Italy studying both classical art and more recent works.

The positions of Moses and Joshua and the people in the foreground is similar to a fresco of the same subject painted by Raphael and his studio in around 1518/19 for the loggia (open-sided gallery or room) of the Papal Palace in the Vatican. Poussin shows this group of people in reverse in his earlier scene of pagan celebration, A Bacchanalian Revel before a Term, which we also own.

This painting's companion The Crossing of the Red Sea is in The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

Style: Baroque, Academic
Samuel Rogers (1763--1855) was a minor poet and an important collector of art with an inherited annual income of at least £5000. He had a home in fashionable St James's Place, London, which is almost certainly where John Linnell set this portrait, although the room and the large painting behind Rogers are too sketchily represented to be identifiable.

Not everyone rated Rogers' poetic talents highly, but his The Pleasures of Memory, first published anonymously in 1792, reached its 15th edition by 1806. The second edition of Rogers' Italy, published in 1830, was illustrated by J.M.W. Turner. Rogers also commissioned Turner to design illustrations for the second edition of his Poems, published in 1834.

By 1833, when Linnell portrayed him, Rogers had already sat to eight other portraitists including Hoppner and Lawrence. A National Gallery Trustee from 1834, Rogers bequeathed three works to the Gallery: Titian's Noli Me Tangere, A Knight in Armour by an imitator of Giorgione (then considered to be by Giorgione himself) and Ecce Homo, thought at the time to be by Guido Reni but now considered to be after Reni.

This picture is a replica of a portrait which Samuel Rogers neither commissioned nor owned, but for which he agreed to give Linnell several sittings in 1833--4. The finished original portrait is dated 1835 and is now in the Tate, London. In September 1846, Linnell agreed to sell the original portrait to his new patron John Gibbons but reserved copyright for himself and the right to paint a replica. Linnell's journal indicates that he painted the original and the replica in the hope that he would find an engraver to produce prints from them. The sale of printed portraits of notable people was a good source of income for artists at the time. Unfortunately that wasn't to be the case with Linnell's portrait of Rogers.

The original and the replica are very similar. They are both painted on wooden panel; the original version is slightly smaller. In each, only the face is painted to any degree of finish and the pose is identical. The National Gallery purchased the replica painting in 1926.

Style: Realist, Victorian
Louis-Gustave Ricard worked primarily as a portraitist, producing almost 150 portraits. Like many French artists, he moved to England during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870--71, where he painted a number of portraits. These probably included this portrait of a young Ellen Odette (1857--1933), who later became the Countess of Desart.

Ellen was the eldest daughter of Henri Louis Bischoffsheim, a wealthy Jewish banker of German descent. If this portrait was painted while Ricard was in England, Ellen would have been 13 or 14 years old when she sat for it. Her youthfulness would support this date for the portrait. As in his Portrait of a Man, Ricard has used soft tones and muted lighting. The dark neutral background and Ellen’s own hair highlight her pale face. Its shape and the curve of her shoulders are echoed are by the oval mahogany panel on which the portrait is painted. Although the portrait shows the influence of Dutch painting on Ricard, Ellen’s open and unaffected expression -- now rather obscured by varnish -- also reveals his awareness of eighteenth-century British portraiture, particularly portraits of children by Reynolds and Romney.

In 1881 Ellen married William Cuffe, 4th Earl of Desart, who had divorced his first wife in 1878. Following William's death in 1898, Ellen, as Countess of Desart, became a significant figure in the Gaelic revival and pursued her own political career in the Irish Free State, which existed from 1922 to 1937. This included her being the first Jew to serve as a senator in Ireland.

Style: Realist
A herdsman waits on his horse while cattle and goats drink at a woodland pool or stream. The sun is half-sunk behind the distant hills, casting a golden light over the canopies of dense trees and sandy ground.  Two country girls with a child and a basket sit beside the water and a man rests behind them. The peacefulness of the group adds to the picture's sense of tranquillity. One of the girls extends her arm to point to the horizon, perhaps admiring the sunset view, or remarking that it will soon be dark.

Gainsborough based this painting on a chalk drawing that he probably made during the mid-1770s (private collection). In the painting, the trees are denser and more imposing than in the drawing. The winding sandy path in the drawing leads to a pool of water in the painting, fed by a stream trickling over large rocks.

The painting was probably made in London after Gainsborough's return from Bath in 1774. It was one of six works he sent to the Royal Academy exhibition in 1777, which included two full-length portraits. It was exhibited simply as 'A large landscape' and was praised by various visitors and reviewers. The Public Advertiser's reviewer wrote: ''Tis hard to say in which branch of the art Mr Gainsborough excels, landscape or portrait painting.'

Although contemporaries saw the influence of the great seventeenth-century Flemish master  Rubens in Gainsborough's new richness of colour and energetic brushwork in his work from the late 1760s, there is no evidence that Gainsborough made studies or copies of landscapes by Rubens. However, in 1768 he did see Rubens's painting now known as 'The Watering Place' in the London home of the 3rd Duke and Duchess of Montagu when he painted their portraits. Gainsborough was so impressed by Rubens's painting that he advised his friend, the actor and playwright David Garrick, to invent an excuse to call upon on the Duke of Montagu 'to see his Grace's Landskip of Rubens'.

While Gainsborough's 'large landscape' echoes some elements from the Rubens, it is not directly copied from it. His debt to Rubens's picture is most evident in the soaring mass of bluish-green trees, and his decision to add a watering place and cattle. Whereas Rubens's cattle are unruly and energetic beasts, Gainsborough's are placid and peaceful. Rubens's picture is a brightly lit morning scene, but Gainsborough's scene is a tranquil and contemplative dream of rural peace, glimpsed in the fading evening light. When Gainsborough's painting entered the National Gallery in 1827, it became known as 'The Watering Place', like Rubens's painting, which was purchased for the Gallery in 1936.

Gainsborough also made a soft-ground etching with aquatint of the scene (Tate Gallery, London), which was not published during his lifetime. The etching differs slightly from the painting -- the herdsman, goats, the other man and the child are missing, and the trees are less dense.

Style: Neoclassical, Georgian