wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
This bearded man was once thought to be a portrait of the painter Anthonis Mor. The painting was given to the British Museum by Andrew Gifford, assistant librarian there, and a label on the back is inscribed: [Sr] Anthony More/Painter given/Dr Gifford 1758. It was transferred with other paintings to the National Portrait Gallery in 1880; the National Gallery's director, Frederic Burton, applied to have four of the works, including this portrait, transferred to Trafalgar Square.

The artist was believed to have been knighted during his visit to England in 1554-5 and was therefore called Sir Anthony More or Sir Antonio Moro. However, there is no resemblance to Mor's Self Portrait of 1558 (Uffizi, Florence) and no real clue as to the sitter's identity. His clothes, particularly his collar, are quite like those worn by Sir Thomas Gresham in a portrait of 1544 (Mercers' Company, London) and Gerlach Fliche's self portrait of 1554 (London, National Portrait Gallery). A date of around 1550 fits with the dendrochronological evidence.

The portrait is much overpainted, but an X-ray image gives a better idea of its quality, and there are distinct affinities with Mor's style. However, the panel itself is so badly constructed that it is unlikely to have come from a panel-maker in any of the principal centres in the Low Countries, where Mor worked. Perhaps the picture was painted in England by an artist strongly influenced by Netherlandish portraiture, and by the work of Mor in particular.

Style: High Renaissance
Teniers's imaginary landscape shows peasants at their leisure. The sheep on the far side of the river enjoy the best of the fitful sunshine, but with a few strokes of the brush Teniers created a shower of rain over the substantial village and the church in the distance. The men in the foreground playing bowls are in shadow, though the white shirt of one competitor stands out as he bends to take aim. His target is a stick fixed in the ground rather than a jack and they play on uneven ground rather than grass -- far from the smooth lawns used today -- but it is essentially the same game.

They play outside an inn. A man runs alongside a ball as if encouraging it along, and others discuss the players’ skills, possibly laying bets on the winner. A girl looks out of the house next door apparently unaware of the man relieving himself against the wall (a comic figure that appears in many of Teniers's paintings). The inn sign ('The Crescent Moon') hangs overhead, looking newly painted, and unlike in many of Teniers’s other pictures of inns, both interior and exterior, this one appears to be solid and well kept. His figures, while a little caricatured, aren’t as grotesque and exaggerated as he often makes them appear (look at An Old Peasant caresses a Kitchen Maid in a Stable, for example).

Images of the activities of peasants appear to have had great appeal to the middle-class people who bought paintings in the seventeenth-century Netherlands, both Holland and Flanders. Teniers made a career of these scenes, and he wasn’t alone: Jan Steen was also a master of the genre, as you can see in his Skittle Players outside an Inn. As the title suggests, Steen’s figures play skittles rather than bowls, and they are better dressed and even less caricatured than those here; he also added more than a hint of flirtation to the scene. Steen's colours are brighter and more lustrous than Teniers’s -- though that may partly be a question of fading and yellowed varnish -- but the paintings both show the hard-working peasant at leisure as a means of entertainment and amusement for the bourgeois classes.

Style: Baroque
This is one of a series of four paintings by Veronese that concern the trials and rewards of love, although their precise meanings remain unclear. The titles are not original and were given to the paintings in 1727. The compositions are designed to be seen from below, so we know the pictures were intended for a ceiling or a series of ceilings.

The paintings are recorded in 1648 in the collection of the Holy Roman Emperor in Prague. We do not know who commissioned them, but it is most likely that the Four Allegories of Love were made for an Italian patron and were still in Italy in the 1620s, when Van Dyck recorded two of the compositions in his Italian sketchbook (British Museum, London).

It is possible that the series of paintings was made to decorate the parallel suites of rooms of a husband and wife, two of the paintings for the reception room and bedchamber of the man and two for the equivalent rooms of his spouse. This painting and Unfaithfulness seem particularly directed at a female viewer.

A couple are united at the hands of a nude woman assisted by a boy – possibly Venus and Cupid, although they lack traits that would identify them securely. The union between the couple is marked by a laurel wreath signifying their virtue and an olive branch symbolising peace. The gold chain attached to the woman by the boy probably refers to marriage, while the dog is a symbol of fidelity. The man wears a thin gold chain wrapped several times around his wrist. The woman sitting on the stone globe and cornucopia may instead represent Fortune, who rewards fidelity with peace (the olive branch) and plenty (the cornucopia). The meaning of the Four Allegories of Love, although now obscure, was no doubt linked to their commission and original location.

The composition of each painting forms a strong diagonal, which on a ceiling would help relate the paintings to one another. The use of diagonals is particularly noticeable in Happy Union. A sheet of preliminary figure studies in pen and ink by Veronese for this series of paintings exists in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The wedded couple in Happy Union were originally conceived as advancing from the left -- the more usual direction of action in a picture -- but were then reversed in the painting, presumably to balance the diagonal movement in the other pictures.

Style: High Renaissance
Prince Charles Edward Stuart, popularly known as ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’, was born in Rome in 1720 and died there in 1788. He was the son of James Francis Edward Stuart and the grandson of the exiled King James II of England and Ireland and VII of Scotland (known as the ‘Old Pretender’). The crowns of England and Scotland had been personally united in 1603 by King James I and VII and their parliaments joined in 1707 (creating Great Britain).The Catholic James II and VI ruled the three Kingdoms from 1685 to 1688, when he was deposed and the Dutch Protestant William of Orange (his nephew and son-in-law) and Mary II (James’s daughter) were invited by Parliament to replace him. After James’s exile, the Jacobite cause aimed to restore the senior and Catholic branch of the Stuart dynasty.

Prince Charles Edward was known as ‘the Young Pretender’ on account of his own claim to the British throne and his heroic but failed attempts to reclaim it for his father. His intention, with French support, was to remove the Protestant Hanoverian monarchy and return Britain to Catholicism. He is particularly remembered for his role in the 1745 Jacobite rising and his defeat at the Battle of Culloden in 1746, after which he escaped to France, so ending hopes for the return of the Catholic Stuart monarchy.

On his arrival in Scotland in 1745, Prince Charles Edward managed to assemble a force large enough to march on Edinburgh, which surrendered to him. On 21 September 1745 he defeated the British army troops in Scotland at the Battle of Prestonpans. Having marched to Derby, he returned north but was pursued by King George II’s son, the Duke of Cumberland, who defeated the Jacobite forces at Culloden on 16 April 1746. Prince Charles Edward fled with the help of Flora MacDonald (disguised as her maid); his escape is commemorated in the popular folk song ‘The Skye Boat Song.’ The British government took various measures to punish and disarm the Highlanders, including making the wearing of Highland dress such as kilts and tartan illegal for any males except within the British army.

This small portrait in oil on wood by an anonymous artist is derived from an engraving after a portrait by Louis Tocqué of 1748. It shows Prince Charles Edward Stuart bust-length in armour and tartan after his defeat and return to France. The portrait is damaged, especially on and around the face, and is in reverse to the engraving. There are two portraits by Tocqué in the National Gallery's collection.

Style: Baroque, Rococo
This portrait is probably by Gentile Bellini, though we can't be sure. It is unusual among his portraits as we do not know the identity of the man portrayed; most of Gentile's surviving portraits are of well-known figures.

Gentile was Venice's official portraitist in all but name: from 1474 he was commissioned to continue the tradition of painting the portrait of each doge (ruler of Venice) to decorate the Sala del Consiglio (council room) in the Doge's Palace. He also painted the only known portrait of Caterina Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus (Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest). She was a Venetian noblewoman and figurehead of the city's dominion over the island.

The sitter was once thought to be a mathematician because he holds a pair of dividers (a compass). This led to the idea that it was a portrait of a man called Girolamo Malatini, who was probably responsible for teaching Giovanni Bellini, Gentile's brother, and Carpaccio, another Venetian painter, how to incorporate theories of perspective into their paintings. But it was not only mathematicians who used compasses -- artists and architects, among other professionals, did too. An alternative suggestion is that Gentile has painted Giovanni. The problem is unresolved, especially as it's not certain that Gentile actually made this work and because the unusual, but elaborate, metal implement could be a different device altogether.

Like many of Gentile's portraits, the background is very dark so that the sitter's face stands out, as do his hands.  Unlike the portraits of doges, the man is shown frontally. He doesn't look at us but his face is turning to his left rather than to the right, as was more usual. This style of portraiture was popular in Venice and is reminiscent of Antonello's portraits of the previous decade. Gentile's approach here is, however, far softer: the contours and outlines are not sharply defined, an effect that is partly achieved by painting on canvas rather than on panel as Antonello did. The lack of detail is unusual in a work by Gentile, who usually took great pains to express the qualities of varying surfaces in paint and enjoyed painting different kinds of materials and jewels.



The simplicity of this image might suggest a more humble and familiar sitter -- his brother, for example. We can't be sure, but the emphasis on the man's hands -- his right hand is more expressive than his face, an innovation that came from the work of Netherlandish painters like Hans Memling -- and the presence of the dividers might suggest someone who placed a value on the creative force of his hands in his work.

Style: High Renaissance
The dappled light in Isack van Ostade’s atmospheric painting falls on the rump of a white horse and its rider’s back, making them the focus of the picture. The horse’s handsome tail and the shiny buttons on the rider’s coat are displayed in minute detail. Behind them, an eager dog is restrained by its master. Its lean companion sniffs at the earth, its ribs showing beneath the fur.

Cool early morning sunlight glows across the foreground, over the hen pecking at the rough turf to the two fine pigs, snouts to the ground, grubbing for food. A woman in a white cap carries two heavy buckets slung from the wooden yoke across her shoulders. She smiles as she chats to a man in a quilted jacket with a cloak slung over one arm. Behind her a small crowd gathers round the cow she has probably been milking.

Life seems to amble along in this painting: there’s time to stop and chat, for the horseman to pause and for the man beside him to communicate with his dogs. The countryside setting appears almost timeless, though van Ostade has explored the effects of time. Light flickers up the wall of the old, crumbling house, revealing the rich browns and ochre of the brick, the wood and the rusting metal. Smoke comes from the chimney although the house seems otherwise deserted, its thatch thinning and weeds growing from the roof. A dovecot under the eaves looks abandoned and the strange iron bars at one gaping window are broken and uneven.

The skeletal outline of the dead oak tree on the right is more prominent than the much larger living tree to the left. Van Ostade has given it a promise of life, with foliage sprouting from its trunk, while the younger tree seems almost to be growing from the side of the old house. It’s as if he’s showing nature as eternally renewing itself.

The painting is typical of the artist’s country scenes, with skilfully depicted objects and subtle colours and textures giving realism and mood. Despite the details to be explored in the foreground, the eye seems drawn along the path ahead of the horseman. Passing more figures in the shadows, you come to a gap in the distant trees. Beyond, in the far distance, is a church spire, little more than a grey needle outlined against the sky -- and yet holding the attention. In a deeply Protestant country, perhaps van Ostade means us to understand this as the end of the rider’s journey and, by inference, the journey’s end for everyone.

Van Ostade was taught by his brother Adriaen, a painter of scenes of peasant life (for example, The Interior of an Inn). Although prolific, Isack died young and his painting career only lasted a decade, so his considerable promise was never fulfilled. You can see more of his work in the National Gallery’s collection, including A Farmyard and the delicate Winter Scene.

Style: Baroque
The merchant ships we see here are in some peril. The wind is so strong that they have been forced to take down their sails and are drifting at the mercy of the gale and the surging sea. They have little control over direction and all three must be towing sea anchors, a sort of underwater parachute, to slow themselves down and reduce the risk of being blown onto rocks or into shallow water.

Our attention is focused on the nearest ship, a man-of-war, as it ploughs into a breaking wave. A sudden shaft of sunlight seems to highlight the moment -- a flash of brilliant white foam against the deep grey of a looming storm cloud. But this vessel is faring well compared with the ship in the middle ground, which appears to have lost two of its masts. Its bowsprit has snapped in half, while the crew is battling to secure one of the yard arms lying across the foredeck. The mainsails of a third ship, which is just discernible in the near distance, have been let fly, the crew apparently unable to bring them in safely in such extreme conditions. There is nothing to be done with them now: they will soon be shredded by the force of the wind.

Willem van de Velde was careful to depict these details accurately. Holland was a powerful trading nation which depended on its merchant fleet and powerful navy for its prosperity and security, and on the inland seas, estuaries, rivers and canals for its domestic transport network. So most of his clientele would have been familiar the maritime world. Here, the configuration of the hull and masts, and even the finer points of the rigging -- some of which is flailing wildly in the wind -- are correctly rendered. It is often possible, through the flags and the design of the hull, to identify the nationality or point of origin of the vessels in van der Velde's pictures. Here the red pennants with a white device in the centre at the mastheads of the nearest ship are probably the flag of Flushing. The vessel just behind flies a tattered Dutch flag at the top of the foremast, suggesting that it carries the vice-admiral (second in command) of a merchant fleet.

When van de Velde painted this picture he had just moved from Amsterdam to England, another maritime nation with a powerful navy and merchant fleet. He appears to have had no problem selling pictures of Dutch ships on the London market, even though there were three major sea battles between the Dutch and the allied navies of the British and French in 1673, the year in which this picture was made. Ironically, it seems likely that van de Velde was at sea on the English side during the first two of these battles. His father, a painter of the same name who was also well known for his maritime scenes, certainly was. He made several drawings during these voyages, and his son seems to have used two of them (both in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich) to help with this composition.

Style: Baroque
The Virgin Mary sits on a carved and inlaid marble throne, the Christ Child perched in the crook of her arm. In a tender gesture he grasps his mother's thumb; with the other hand, she holds the pink cloth in which he is wrapped between her slender thumb and forefinger. Elegant angels dressed in soft glowing colours gaze adoringly at them, clasping the pinnacles of the throne with their fingers or crossing their arms in prayer.

This large altarpiece of the Virgin and Child enthroned was once even bigger, but it has been cut down at the base; it probably originally showed the Virgin full length. It was painted in the early fourteenth century, when artists, including Giotto and Duccio, were rethinking Byzantine (Eastern Christian) conventions in search of a more naturalistic way of painting.

The anonymous Master of the Albertini (Master of the Casole Fresco) was one of Duccio's earliest followers, taking from him elegant flowing lines, soft colours and graceful gestures. The flesh is underpainted with green earth. This was a sophisticated optical device used by Trecento painters to suggest the cool mid-tones of human skin (it is perhaps now more visible here than was originally intended). As in Duccio's The Virgin and Child with Saint Dominic and Saint Aurea, and Patriarchs and Prophets, the Virgin's robe is here edged with a fluid gold hem, and Christ's feet are crossed in anticipation of their pose at the Crucifixion. Even small details, such as the white line along the top of the lips, are copied from Duccio.

The precise dating of the Albertini Master's works and the extent of his oeuvre are still under debate. This painting seems to sit between his Virgin and Child, which is very similar to the work of Duccio, and his Virgin and Child Enthroned, which more closely resembles the work of Giotto (both Pinacoteca, Siena). He was an eclectic painter, drawing details from a variety of Sienese artists, including the Badia a Isola Master and the Master of Città di Castello, with whom he perhaps shared a workshop: both used the same five-petal rosette tool to punch the gilded background. They might even have been brothers working in close collaboration, like Ambrogio and Pietro Lorenzetti. There were numerous families of painters working together in fourteenth-century Siena, as throughout Italy.

The painting is said to have came from Santa Croce, Florence, and might have been commissioned by a confraternity, the Laudesi, that met in the Bardi Vernio chapel there. If this provenance is correct, the painting would have been the second Sienese picture made for a confraternity attached to a major Florentine church, Duccio's Rucellai Madonna having been the first.

In the 1950s, the painting was transferred from its original wooden panel to a synthetic support. When the back was exposed, drawings of a sphinx, a game board and what may have been either a window or a bishop's mitre became visible.

Style: Gothic, Early Renaissance
Restored in 2018--19, this is one of the more significant ​paintings of the Virgin Mary to survive ​from the workshop of the Florentine Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli. The circular format was very popular in the fifteenth century and particularly common for paintings decorating the bedchambers of Florentine households. Botticelli's workshop responded to this demand, producing a great number of circular paintings (tondi) that vary in composition, dimension and artistic quality. A common feature of Botticelli’s tondi is the way in which individual figures react to the format of the painting, seen here in the young Saint John the Baptist on the left and the angel on the right, who bend slightly forward as if to fit within the border.

The Virgin Mary's powerful frontal gaze makes this tondo stand out. Her exposed breast, with which she feeds Christ, is also central to its design. Images of the Virgin Mary breastfeeding added a human element to the representation of the mother of God. The Virgin's exposed breast was uncovered only as part of the recent restoration. It had been overpainted to suit the preferences of an earlier owner.

Unfortunately, we don't know for whom this painting was originally made. An early inscription on the back suggests the Florentine architect and woodworker Giuliano da Sangallo.  He is known to have had a sizeable art collection in his Florentine palace. Alternatively, the inscription may refer to Sangallo as the maker of the frame. The plethora of fruits that decorate the frame may hint at the idea of abundance, which is also underlined by the image of the breastfeeding Virgin.

This tondo was among the very first early Italian paintings (paintings made before 1500) to enter the National Gallery's collection. Its acquisition in 1855 coincided with the rise in popularity of Botticelli. Many artists came to see it, producing copies and studying its tempera technique. Such was its appeal that at some point the tondo was displayed next to works by Raphael. But in the early twentieth century, scholars demoted it, arguing that it was a product of Botticelli’s workshop rather than by the artist himself. Workshop assistants were essential to artistic production during the Renaissance, but by this time it was believed that their involvement reduced a painting's quality. Technical investigations have confirmed the use of partial cartoons, which were used to transfer a design to the surface of the painting -- a practice common in a Renaissance workshop. Numerous changes were made at a much later stage, however, especially in the hands and hair of the angel on the right, some visible to the naked eye.

We know of several artists who were employed in Botticelli’s workshop, the most famous being Filippino Lippi, with whom Botticelli frequently collaborated (see Adoration of the Kings, for example).  We do not know, however, which artists worked on this painting.

Style: Early Renaissance
The Virgin Mary, Christ Child and Saint Anne, the Virgin's mother, sit in a small 'paradise' garden. Saint Anne holds a fruit, probably a pear, in one hand and reaches out to Christ with the other. A book lies open on her knees.

The garden is edged by a turf bench supported by bricks, on which Anne is seated. A slightly ramshackle but peaceful farmyard lies behind, with ducks in a pond and a towered farm house. A man sits on a bench reading a book while another leans on the side of the porch, apparently chatting to a man who tends a donkey. A fourth man comes in through a gate in the wall.

The scene is derived from a painting possibly by  Jan Provoost, of which several versions survive, but this picture seems closer in style to Albert Cornelis. He may have acquired or rented a popular 'pattern' from another workshop.

Style: High Renaissance