wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
Frans Hals was -- and still is -- much admired for his ability to make his group portraits seem like a spontaneous snapshot of harmonious interactions. They often have the air of the moments just before a formal photograph is taken, when people are still chatting and settling down before the photographer calls them to order.

Here we are looking at a family group with a mother and father surrounded by their seven children, a nursemaid holding the latest baby. There are two centres of attention among the sitters, formed around the two youngest children -- just what you might expect in a large family such as this. But while these poses and interactions might at first seem unrehearsed, the arrangement has been carefully composed by Hals and resonates well beyond the naturalism of the interest excited by the youngest children.

There is, for example, a clear division between the sexes and a hierarchy. The male and female members of the family form two clear diagonal lines, separated by the father -- one behind and the other in front of him. The men form the core of the family group, the father sitting centre stage with his two older sons flanking him. The boys' poses illustrate their relative maturity, too. The youngest is in a playful mood, distracting his baby sibling with a pink rose or a carnation. His older brother seems to want to join in, but the eldest son leans back slightly. He is amused, but detached: too old for such games. The way he stands behind his parents is suggestive of a new hierarchy to come. One day he will take over from his father as head of the family.

His eldest sister, who is perhaps a little older than him, stands on the right, on the edge both of the picture and of the group. She is supporting her mother, but ready one day to marry and leave the family. As with the boys, Hals suggests the growing maturity of the girls. While the eldest stands ready to help with the childcare, her middle sister is becoming self sufficient. She is the only figure to look out of the picture, catching our eye and drawing us into the moment as she reaches into her basket. We can’t help wondering what she is about to produce; presumably, she is handing out another of the plums that her sisters are holding.

While we don’t know the name of the family, we can tell from the style of the costumes that it was probably painted in the late 1640s. The canvas has probably been cut down at the top and bottom. The background landscape is by another artist, possibly Pieter de Molijn or Reyer Claesz. Suycker, and may have been painted after the figures were completed. Such collaborations were common practice among the highly specialised Dutch and Flemish artists of the seventeenth century.

Style: Baroque
This small painting of a shaded arbour could be set in a cafe or restaurant, but it may be a private garden. Dappled sunlight falls through the trellis and dark foliage to illuminate the sandy floor and a table covered by a white cloth. Although no people are present, two filled wine glasses on a silver tray -- the objects closest to us -- suggest a meeting, or perhaps a romantic assignation.

Sargent is particularly attentive to the play of light and the way that objects, such as the tablecloth, reflect light and colours from their surroundings. He uses a loose flickering brushstroke, without reworking or blending the paint, to create an effect of immediacy and freshness. Areas directly lit by the sun are painted using a fluid impasto. This technique of painting alla prima (directly onto the canvas with a loaded brush) shows the influence of Impressionism, a new way of painting, particularly outdoors, which Sargent had been studying while in Paris. Here he combines Monet’s interest in optical atmospheric effects with Pissarro's darker tones and sense of structure. This type of setting -- an outdoor location where there is eating and drinking -- often appears in Impressionist paintings.

Despite its apparent informality, this is a highly structured, even complex, composition. Sargent is interested in the different shapes within the scene and in the visual relationship between surfaces and edges. Using the corners of the fence and the roof and also the strong diagonal of the sideboard, he creates a box-like space. He reinforces this by tightly cropping the picture space and by abruptly jumping from the detailed still life in the foreground to the out-of-focus foliage beyond. The box structure is reinforced by repeated right angles elsewhere in the picture -- like the garden wall and the shape of the table. Other shapes are repeated elsewhere: the circular rims and bases of the wineglasses are echoed by the tray, the diamond pattern of the trellis is echoed by the large diamond patch of sunlit floor in the lower right corner and the verticals of the posts and tree trunks are repeated by the table legs. There may in fact be two tables, as the legs at either end do not match.

Sargent gave the painting to his teacher at time, Emile Carolus-Duran, with whom he had studied for three years while also being enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Carolus-Duran, a fashionable portrait painter but also a friend of Courbet and Manet, was a proponent of realism, derived from Velázquez, based upon the direct observation of light and atmospheric effects. This picture is perhaps a demonstration piece in which Sargent, still only around 19 years old, displayed his precocious skill, particularly his control of contrasting light and dark tones.

Although retrospectively dated 1874 on the canvas, the picture was probably painted the following year either at Saint-Enogat in Brittany, where Sargent spent the summer of 1875, or in the picturesque village of Grez-sur-Loing in the forest of Fontainbleau. This had been a favourite haunt of the Barbizon artists and was also popular with Carolus-Duran’s students.

Style: Post-Impressionist, Victorian
A pale young man, naked but for a loincloth, stands in a stone niche, seemingly unaware of the arrows in his arm and leg. This is Saint Sebastian, a Roman soldier who secretly converted to Christianity. When his faith was discovered, he was shot with arrows but miraculously survived.

Here, the saint seems more like a classical statue than a living figure. Cima must have been aware of Tullio Lombardo's famous Adam (about 1490--9), the first nude marble statue sculpted since antiquity; he reproduces the figure's stance, curly hair and slightly vacant expression almost precisely.

Saint Sebastian was enormously popular in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. He was thought to provide protection from the plague, which repeatedly ravaged central Italy in the fifteenth century: his arrow wounds were thought to be like the swellings it caused. He is often shown tied to a tree, as in The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian; the tree is missing here, but he still has his hands behind his back.

This painting is one of two panels from the S. Maria dei Crociferi Altarpiece. They must have formed the side panels of a triptych or polyptych, but we are not sure exactly when they were made, or where for.

Cima da Conegliano made a number of pictures of Saint Sebastian, beginning with the side panels of two large altarpieces, painted in around 1486--8. One is still in the parish church at Olera, near Bergamo; the other was from Oderzo, in the Venetian territories on the mainland. The series culminates in the figure of the saint in the side panel of the altarpiece for San Rocco, painted in about 1500--2, in Mestre, also on the Venetian mainland. Our panel probably comes towards the end of the series. In the earliest examples, the saint stands against a burnished gold background, as in medieval altarpieces, while the stone niche in our panel is much more Renaissance in style.

Like many Renaissance artists, Cima sped up the production process for altarpieces by reusing designs for different commissions. The saint in our panel is based on his figure in the so-called Dragan Altarpiece (Galleria dell'Accademia, Venice), commissioned in about 1499 by Venetian shipowner Giorgio Dragan for his family chapel in Santa Maria della Carita, Venice. Another painting of the saint (Berenson Collection, Villa I Tatti, Settignano) also followed the same design.

Style: High Renaissance
A woman, her hair covered by an elaborate structure of caps and semi-transparent veils, holds a luxurious illuminated book in a green velvet binding. The pot identifies her as Mary Magdalene: it holds the ointment with which the saint anointed Christ's feet.

The hands and book are copied from Saint Barbara in Gerard David's The Virgin and Child with Saints and Donor. They are so close that it seems Ambrosius Benson copied from the original or that he had access to the preliminary drawings. He was a pupil of David, and the two were involved in a lawsuit about patterns which David alleged he had found in Benson's chest. The folds of the veil are extremely close to Mary Magdalene's headdress in The Magdalen in a Landscape by Albert Cornelis, from whom Benson borrowed patterns.

Benson specialised in half-lengths of young women depicted as Mary Magdalene or as sibyls (female oracles in classical mythology). This lady's strangely elongated ear and large hands are typical of the artist. The style of her dress suggests a date of about 1520, making it one of the artist's earliest such pictures.

Style: High Renaissance
Located just outside Copenhagen, the Citadel (Kastellet) was a former military fort surrounded by moats and ramparts. Last used during the British bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807, it still housed around 600 soldiers and their families. Christen Købke and his parents lived there from 1819 to 1833. Købke’s father was the Citadel's master baker, and the family moved out when he retired. Købke often returned to the Citadel over the next four years. He painted several views of it including this one, which he may have given to his mother as a souvenir of their former home.

In this picture, Købke has painted a drawbridge outside the Citadel's north gate. From a vantage point at the foot of the rampart beside the bridge, he is looking across the moat looking towards a guardhouse on the other side. Although the drawbridge no longer exits, Købke’s preliminary sketches and oil study allow us to follow the choices he made in selecting this particular point of view. In an initial sketch (National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen) he placed himself to the left of the bridge. However, realising perhaps that the bridge seen from this location would block the view, he reversed the composition in a later, highly detailed drawing (Vejle Art Museum, Denmark) and an oil sketch (National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen). The oil sketch would have been painted outdoors, on site, most likely in May 1837.  The revised vantage point, to the right of bridge and slightly further from it, allows the bridge to lead our eye into the picture and gives a clear view of the guardhouse.

Købke worked on the final painting in his studio at home, signing and dating it in September 1837. In contrast to the spontaneity of the oil sketch, he returned to the detailed precision of the compositional drawing. The intricacy and complexity of the manmade structure recalls the work of Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, his teacher at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen -- for example, Eckersberg’s View of the Forum in Rome. Bathed in an evening light, rather than the bright daylight of the oil sketch, and with a hint of pink in the sky, Købke's view is suffused with tones of the complementary colours red and green. Other changes included adding two soldiers fishing in the canal and replacing a soldier on the bridge with a sailor with his back turned towards us, who gazes at the scene before him, as we do. Købke also enhanced the effect of depth by placing a small group of figures at the far end of the bridge and by adding a thick band of rushes along the picture’s lower edge.

One viewer, the theologian W.F. Wiborg, pointed out that the withered rushes indicated autumn although the new leaves on the trees suggested spring. Wiborg also claimed it was impossible to identify the exact type of poplar tree and that, ‘the sky has an evening light, while the earth has midday light'. Although such demands for accuracy were typical of art criticism at that time, Købke was perhaps more interested in creating a specific mood -- one infused with a fond nostalgia for the place where he grew up.

Style: Realist, Romantic
Snow scenes were a particular favourite among the Impressionists, and Monet painted several canvases that explore the way sunlight plays upon the snow, reflecting tones of red, pink, purple and blue at different times of day. In 1875, for example, he had painted Snow Scene at Argenteuil, setting his snowy scene in the Paris suburb where he was living at the time. This scene of Lavacourt was produced a few years later, when he was living at Vétheuil, about 60 kilometres further north. It shows a tiny hamlet on a bend in the Seine on the opposite bank of the river to his home.

Monet had left Argenteuil in April 1878 and moved to Vétheuil during a period of great financial hardship: the market for his paintings was proving sluggish, and at Vétheuil he was able to share  a modest house with his former patrons, the Hoschedés, who had also fallen on hard times. Away from the distractions of Paris and isolated from his fellow artists, he began to draw subjects and inspiration from his new rural environment.  He abandoned cityscapes to devote himself to landscape, frequently working out of doors, no doubt partly to escape from his cramped home which lacked a studio. It was here that he started painting in series, observing the same motif in different seasons and weather conditions.

This picture is dated 1881, but it was probably painted earlier: Monet sometimes added a signature and an inaccurate date long after the picture was painted. It may date to the winter of 1879/80, which was unusually cold. The Seine froze over and Monet was captivated by the way the landscape was transformed by snow and ice, braving the freezing temperatures to set up his easel outside. This painting is one of a group of similar views looking upstream with the tumbledown cottages of Lavacourt on the right. In contrast to the explicit modernity of his views of Paris and its suburbs, it presents a traditional rural world untouched by industry.

The composition is simple but tightly structured. The strong diagonal formed by the houses and the line of trees guides our eyes over the green waters of the Seine and across to the opposite side of the river. The great bank of snow in the foreground is conveyed with broad sweeps of the brush, the whites overlain with blues that become darker in the middle distance and which are reflected in the roofs of the houses. The cold blue and grey tones suggest that this side of the river is in shadow, unlike the opposite side, where pink tones suggest the warmth of pale sunlight.

In 1905, the critic Frank Rutter launched a French Impressionist Fund Committee, which aimed to buy an Impressionist painting for the nation and present it to the National Gallery. This was the painting that was suggested, but it was evidently too avant-garde for the Gallery’s trustees. The Committee was warned that ‘Boudin was the furthest limit to which the National Gallery was prepared to go’, and Boudin’s The Entrance to Trouville Harbour was bought instead. Monet’s picture was bought by the collector and dealer Hugh Lane, ironically ending up at the National Gallery as part of his bequest in 1917.

Style: Impressionist
At first glance, the rather formal pose and opulent setting might suggest this is a portrait of a wealthy individual or perhaps an aristocrat. But as is often the case with Ingres, there is more going on in this painting than might at first appear. The sitter, Monsieur de Norvins, had been appointed Chief of Police in Rome (then under French rule) in January 1811, the year in which the portrait was painted. However, subsequent political events led him to make changes to it. Clues to these changes are visible in the picture -- but only if we look closely.

Monsieur de Norvins is presented as a reserved and rather forbidding figure. Leaning on a chair, his pose is immovable, its rigidity echoed by the vertical line of the curtain on his right. His arms are held tight against his body, and he does not smile. Instead, his thin lips, framed by a hint of stubble, are slightly pursed, as if he is thinking or coming to a decision. His large eyes look directly at us, holding us in his sidelong gaze. Norvins’ black suit further adds to the severe mood of the painting, but it also creates a sharp contrast with the brilliant white of his collar and shirt cuffs. The only colour on his clothing is from the vivid band of red ribbon indicating he is a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. This flash of red also picks up on the deep maroon of the damask fabric on the wall and chair. Ingres confidently displays his skill in rendering the qualities of different materials, such as the shadows in the folds of the jacket’s black cloth and the ribbon’s sheen.

Norvins was a supporter of the Emperor Napoleon -- and later wrote a very successful four-volume biography of him -- and his political allegiance is shown by the Napoleonic gesture of placing his left hand inside his jacket. Following the fall of Napoleon in April 1814 and the return to power of the Bourbon monarchy, any evidence of overt loyalty to the former Emperor would have been potentially harmful to Norvins’ political career and to Ingres, as an ambitious young artist. Ingres responded to this new political situation by repainting parts of the canvas. In addition to minor reworking around Norvins' collar and head, which was originally slightly higher, he painted a length of red drapery, which spills over the chair, on the left of picture. This was to hide a bust, resting on a tall pedestal, which had originally been placed in the upper left corner. The bust was most likely of the King of Rome, the infant son of Napoleon, born in March 1811. Because oil paint thins over time, the bust is now visible as a ghostly presence beneath the drapery.

As if to compensate for the lost bust, Ingres added a bronze sculpture -- copied after a marble in the Vatican -- of the Roman goddess, Minerva, on the right of the picture. On the pedestal beneath it, the letters ROM refer to Norvins’ position in Rome. As Ingres painted within the limited space available, both the bust and inscription are awkwardly cropped. The red wallpaper is also now clearly visible through the thin overpainting.

Style: Neoclassical
This is one of the earliest studies for A Sunday on La Grande Jatte of 1884--6 (Art Institute of Chicago). Like most of Seurat’s other oil sketches, it is painted on a small board of unprimed wood, which is clearly visible in some areas such as the water. It was very likely painted on location.

As this study was painted in the morning, the sunlight and shadows are the reverse of other studies and of the final painting itself. Shining from the south-east, the sun lights up the foreground. The middle ground is in shade because the sunlight cannot penetrate the dense overhead foliage. Despite the extensive shaded areas, Seurat uses touches of golden-yellow throughout, which provide a warm tone and unify the composition. These touches also contribute to the yellow-green of the sunlit areas.

Although Seurat has included several figures, his focus here is on the colours of the grassy area that fills almost three-quarters of the picture. Green tones dominate the grassy area, but Seurat avoids uniformity by adding strokes of orange, pink, wine red and light blue. These reds and pinks, reinforced with a purplish blue, are also used for the tree trunks. Darker greens and blues indicate shaded areas, while lighter greens, enlivened by touches of orange (for broken sunlight) and blue (for reflected light), are used for less shaded areas. The golden-yellow also appears in the water, where Seurat adds creamy whites and pinks to the light and dark blues. He has used evenly placed horizontal strokes for the water, which contrast with the more agitated, almost scribbled brushstrokes used elsewhere, particularly in the foreground.

Although Seurat’s colour choices were based upon his direct observation of the landscape, they were also informed by his knowledge of contemporary colour theory. The purple tints along the edges of the sunlit areas are based upon a colour-light contrast of purple and green rather than the more conventional complementary colour pairing of purple and yellow.

Style: Pointillist
This is one of the most well-known views of classical Rome. We are looking along the Forum towards the Palazzo Senatorio on the Capitol. Although the Forum had yet to be fully excavated, the three surviving columns of the Temple of Castor and Pollux can be seen here on the left. The remains of the Temples of Saturn and Vespasian are in the middle distance, and the Arch of Septimius Severus is on the right.

The Danish artist Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg painted this picture during the three years he spent in Italy from 1813 to 1816, when he produced around 40 views of Rome and its surroundings as well as figure compositions and portraits. Although modest in scale, these views are among his finest achievements. Writing to the engraver J.F. Clemens in July 1814, Eckersberg announced his plan to 'make a collection of the most beautiful views in and around Rome … I have completed about ten small studies which are all painted on the spot direct from nature’. This painting corresponds with a detailed drawing (Hirschsprung Collection, Copenhagen), dated 8 June 1814. This drawing would have given him a very precise guide when painting, although it is likely that some of the picture was painted at the Forum itself.

Illuminated by the bright sunlight -- the short shadows indicate it is around midday -- the warm pinks, orange-browns and yellow ochre of the buildings almost glow against a clear blue sky. Eckersberg painted the architecture, particularly the ruins, in meticulous detail. The picture is structured around a scaffolding of interlocking horizontals and verticals, which form a near abstract grid that binds the composition together. In his later years, when a professor at the Royal Academy in Copenhagen, Eckersberg became particularly interested in the theory of perspective and published his own rules about spatial construction and the effects of light and shade.

Eckersberg's use of architectural features to define space perhaps also shows the influence of the neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David, whose studio Eckersberg frequented when in Paris from 1810 to 1813 and who had encouraged him to visit Italy. In his views of Rome, Eckersberg combines neoclassical severity with a new realism based upon observation, which was to characterise his mature style. Yet this is more than just a topographical study. Eckersberg gives equal attention to everyday activities, including transporting goods by cart, watering a horse at the fountain and herding mules. This creating a poignant contrast between the quiet routine of contemporary agrarian life and the urban grandeur of what had once been Imperial Rome.

Landscape painters working in and around Rome from around 1780 to 1830 often painted on location, anticipating the practice of painting outdoors that became a significant aspect of later nineteenth-century art. This painting, along with Corot’s oil sketch The Roman Campagna, with the Claudian Aqueduct, is a fine example of work produced in the 1820s and 1830s by this international community of artists.

Style: Neoclassical