wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
The story of Jupiter and Semele is told in the third book of Ovid's Metamorphoses. The god Jupiter takes the mortal woman Semele as his mistress and makes her pregnant. When Jupiter's wife, the goddess Juno, finds out, she disguises herself as Semele's old nurse and suggests to Semele that her lover may not really be Jupiter. She tells Semele to ask Jupiter to come to her in the form he has when he visits Juno. Jupiter arrives as a mighty thunderbolt armed with fire and Semele is burned to ashes.

Here, Jupiter swoops down ringed by stormy grey clouds. Golden light burns behind him and red flames spurt from his hands and feet. An eagle --  a form Jupiter takes for his seductions -- flies with him towards Semele, who lies waiting, naked on her bed. She gazes dreamily into the distance, unaware of the terrible fate that awaits her. The folds of her red bed-hangings echo the shape and colour of Jupiter's flames.

The picture is painted on a wooden panel and was probably originally incorporated into a piece of furniture such as a bed. The lines of the floor tiles indicate that the painting was intended to be seen from below. The paint has become translucent over time, making the clouds appear patchy, and the shadowed areas of Jupiter's cloak are extensively crackled from the shrinking of the oil-rich paint. Some of the paint may also have changed from its intended colour: the dark brown tree to the left may have originally been green.

The subject of Jupiter and Semele is not very common in painting but in mid-sixteenth century Venice it sometimes appeared in the decoration of ceilings and furniture. This painting may be by Tintoretto; one of his earliest works was an octagonal ceiling canvas of the same subject for the palace of Vettore Pisani in Venice (Galleria Estense, Modena).

This panel seems to have been part of a series illustrating other stories from Ovid's Metamorphoses. Two other paintings thought to be from the same series, Latona changing the Lycian Peasants into Frogs and Apollo and Diana killing the children of Niobe (Courtauld Institute Gallery, London), are of the same height, painted on wood from the same tree and marked with the same stamp on the back. A panel of Argos and Mercury, the present location of which is unknown, may also have belonged to this set.

Style: High Renaissance
The languid brown eyes of a young man gaze out at us, his look faintly quizzical. But who is he? His long hair waves softly about his neck, the shadow of a moustache dusts his upper lip, a wisp of a curl brushes a wide brow, and his full mouth pouts a little, adding to the uncertainty of his expression.

The portrait is a miniature, just over 16 by 12.2 cm. Its delicate oval shape is contained in a heavy, hexagonal Netherlandish frame, black stippled with red. In the days before photography, miniature portraits were made of wealthy people for families, friends or for diplomatic contacts. They were often copies of larger portraits, but sometimes there was just one made, as in this case. The pose -- the torso turned to the side and the face looking back at the viewer -- originates with Raphael, and was taken up by Van Dyck. Coques admired and aspired to emulate him, becoming known as 'The Little Van Dyck'.

There are more aspects about the image itself that raise questions. Because of the ribbons fluttering around the arm facing us, made fashionable by Louis XIV, it is difficult to tell what that arm is doing. Does the young man have his hand on his hip, his elbow bent; is his arm hanging by his side? The blue fabric at his neck is a cravat string -- with no cravat. To complement this jacket a flat, fan-shaped cravat would be the elegant choice, but it may be that this picture was painted when the cravat was falling out of fashion (and becoming a forerunner to the ties we know today).

Who was this person, rich and eminent enough to have had a likeness taken, yet whose name has been lost? It's likely that we shall never know. There isn't enough of a trail to follow. What little there is ends in 1915, it appears.

When the portrait came to the National Gallery in 1910, it had a label on the back stating that the young man was Charles Mordaunt, 3rd Earl of Monmouth. By the time a new catalogue was published in 1915, this attribution had been discounted. He was dubbed with the title 'Unknown', and there he stays. The portrait is neither signed nor dated, but the style and brushwork are Coques's. The date -- about 1670 -- can be estimated by the man's glamorous, white satin jacket. This fashion came a year or two earlier and stayed popular for a long time -- so it might be later than 1670 but it can't be much before.

Was he English? There must have been some reason for the original attribution, long since lost. Coques worked mainly in Antwerp though was employed by several of the European courts. The young man might have come across him on the Grand Tour -- an educational tour of the continent for young aristocrats -- or it's thought that Coques may have been in England around 1640, and might have made useful contacts then.

Style: Baroque
Frans Hals’s great gift as a portraitist -- and what made him so popular among the merchants, burgomasters, officers and petty aristocracy of his home town of Haarlem -- was his ability both to capture a convincing likeness and to make his sitters seem to come alive. There are several ways in which he did this, and this painting offers some particularly good examples of his techniques.

Although many of Hals's portraits of individuals (as opposed to his group paintings) are shown only bust or half-length, the artist often found a way to inject a sense of energy into the poses. Here, the sitter leans back slightly, thrusting his elbow towards us. This, and the way that he tilts his head and grasps his gloves in his left hand, lifting them slightly as he does so, implies movement -- a moment captured. Hals had to work on the pose to achieve this effect. If you look carefully at the outline of the man’s hat and left arm, you can see that the artist made changes to his first draft, shifting the sitter back slightly in a way that emphasises the tilt of the head and the jut of the elbow.

Hals also liked to suggest a touch of humour in his sitter’s facial expressions. There is often a light in the eye, a twitch of the lip, or -- as here -- the slightest sense of a raised eyebrow, which gives the impression that the sitter is reacting to the viewer. The effect here is emphasised by the light which rakes across from the upper left side, highlighting the details and nuances of his face, such as the ruddy cheeks and slightly hooded eyes. He seems to be looking at us, as much as we are looking at him.

The artist's extraordinarily economical and apparently spontaneous brushwork is apparent here too. Hals was a master of suggestion, depicting, for example, the lacy edging of the sitter’s collar with only the briefest of stipple marks made with the edge of his brush. The pair of gloves is articulated with minimal brushstrokes; indeed there is barely enough detail for us to be able to interpret them as gloves. The sitter's fingers too are described only with broad strokes of grey, green, pink and yellow.

The lack of meticulously defined outlines enhances the feeling that this is not a static image, but one brought to life by the blur of movement. Yet amid such apparently free and spontaneous brushwork, Hals also knew how to work more intensively, using layers and thicker paint to suggest the colour and texture of the sitter’s face. And there are tiny touches too. For example, among the broad paint strokes in the fingers of the sitter's left hand, Hals has added a minute line of bright pink, where the light has caught one of the tiny ridges on the sitter's little fingernail.

The sitter in this portrait is clearly a prosperous man, conventionally but expensively dressed in the style of the mid-1640s. Beyond that, no evidence has survived -- we don’t know who he is.

Style: Baroque
At first glance, this dark room might seem bare and forbidding but the deep brown of the walls encloses the two figures in warmth and serenity. There's just enough light to reveal them but Maes doesn't show the window, so the comfortable atmosphere isn't disturbed. The concentration of woman and child, their gaze directed intently downwards, takes our own eyes to the woman's hands. She holds the parsnip delicately, scraping it away from her, so that the peel lands in the dish in her lap. And we, like the little girl, learn how it should be done.

At the time the painting was made, Calvinist preachers -- often vociferously -- recommended that 'the devil should be beaten out of a child', but genre pictures of this kind showed a gentler attitude towards the education and discipline of children. The painting wasn't necessarily hung on a wall as a lesson in child-rearing, but it would have been seen at least as a picture of domestic calm to be held as a desired end.

Since it arrived at the National Gallery in 1838, the picture has had three different titles, first 'Mother Scraping Parsnips with a Child', second 'The Cookmaid' and now 'A Woman scraping Parsnips with a Child standing by her'. We don't know why the changes were made or exactly when, but it does make the relationship between woman and child open to question. Are we looking at the mother of the household with her child, a servant with her mistress's child, or a servant with her own child? The woman's clothes aren't luxurious -- simple, modest and made of fairly rough, hard-wearing fabrics -- but her hair is immaculate, pulled back under a cap displaying pearl-like beads. No silks or satins for the child either, but she has a bib and an apron to keep her unpretentious clothes clean. Her hair isn't long enough to pin back, but its tendrils are held tidily by her cap.

The ceramic jug standing alone on the window sill was an expensive item. Maes makes a feature of it by lighting it up till it almost glows. Was it precious to the household? Or did he simply include it because the composition needed filling out? There's a certain sadness in its isolation, just as the meagreness of only three parsnips seem to suggest a poor meal for woman and child. It's possible that Maes is showing a virtuous, hard-working woman, bringing up her child to be a good housewife and mother in straitened circumstances, although perhaps the most likely interpretation remains that we are looking at the maid of the household.

Style: Baroque
Abandoned by her lover, the Trojan hero Aeneas, the devastated Dido, Queen of Carthage, stands on a pyre composed of his armour and his gifts to her. On the left, outside the palace walls, we can see a rocky coastline and the sea over which Aeneas has sailed away; on the right, two foot soldiers with spears watch a group of riders hunting. In the centre, in a carefully painted complex of Renaissance buildings, Dido stands on top of a tall platform, flames already licking the lower level -- she is about to plunge a knife into her breast. Her subjects watch from the arcades and balconies around the square.

This panel's dimensions suggest that it came from a spalliere, a painting set into the panelling of a room, rather than a cassone (a large chest) as has long been thought. Both often showed tales from classical poetry or history, many illustrating the consequences of good and bad behaviour for husbands and wives. Dido was seen as a warning against uncontrolled female sexuality: in Dante's Inferno, she was condemned to hell for her consuming passion for Aeneas.

The details in the painting do not follow exactly the story as told in Virgil's Aeneid. Some of the figures are copied from prints, a widespread practice among Renaissance artists. The two soldiers on the extreme right, for example, are derived from Albrecht Dürer's Five Footsoldiers and a mounted Turk of about 1495; the small figures in the background to the left of the pyre are from the same print, but are inverted. The soldier in red in the foreground on the left is from The Senators, a print by Andrea Mantegna that seems to have been planned, but not used, as part of his Triumphs of Caesar. Some of the objects on the pyre are also taken from a preliminary version of the sixth scene in the Triumphs, which was engraved on the same plate as The Senators.

Style: High Renaissance
This group portrait was given by Pope Urban VIII (1568–1644, Pope from 1623) to his nephew, Cardinal Francesco Barberini (1597–1679). The subjects have not been identified, but it is thought that they may be from Venice as the dress of the men is Venetian in style. The child's costume, which is recognisably that of a girl, can be dated to around 1540.

The portrait is listed in four Barberini inventories (1629; 1630; 1631–6; 1692–1704) as a painting by Titian, but this attribution is impossible. The fusion of Venetian and Netherlandish stylistic and technical characteristics suggests the picture may be by a Venetian painter who had absorbed Netherlandish influences. The artist might otherwise be a Netherlandish painter working in Venice or the Veneto. The painting was once attributed to Dirck Barendsz (1532–1594) who, according to the historian Karel van Mander, was in Venice in about 1555. A more likely contender is Jan Steven van Calcar (1499?–1546), who was born in Germany but moved to work in Venice, where he became a close follower of Titian.

Style: High Renaissance
In this busy but peaceful scene Abraham Storck shows an idealised version of life on a Dutch river in the seventeenth century, but his painting of the vessels is detailed and accurate. The rising sun is hidden behind the sails of the man-of-war (the great ship coming in from the sea) and the grey dawn light lifts as the morning clouds drift away almost imperceptibly on a faint breeze. The light catches the graceful folds of the sails, making them glow. There's hardly a ripple to disturb the reflections in the still water.

The central boat is a boyer yacht, an inshore vessel with a scoop-shaped leeboard that would be lowered in rough weather to keep the vessel on an even keel. Next to it, with its brown sail limp and waiting for the wind, is a tjalk (a heavy barge). Its Dutch flag is just beginning to fill with the first of the wind, and it is crowded with men in black cocked hats -- a new fashion -- and heavy coats. Beyond is a statenyacht, an official vessel for transporting members of the States General and important foreign visitors, with the arms of the Province of Holland on its stern and a splendid silver lamp and Dutch flag above them.

On the river banks people are already fishing, watching the boats and chatting, seemingly at leisure against a background of windmills and houses, tall masts and distant spires. Men are at work on the spit of land in the middle of the river, their boats moored at either end. The spindly trees have fresh new leaves and the pollarded willow leaning over the water already has young shoots. The scene looks authentic, and the large church in the background looks like St Lawrence Cathedral in Rotterdam -- but there the resemblance to the city ends.

As far as we know, Abraham Storck never left Holland. He wasn't interested in his paintings being topographically accurate: he wanted to present an atmosphere, sometimes a feeling of excitement and wonder at new discoveries (as in Whaling Grounds in the Arctic, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) and sometimes a romantic view of exotic places (as in Seaport with Large and Small Ships, Maidstone Museum). In this painting he has taken a building that could be Rotterdam Cathedral and placed it in the centre of the background. Unlike the many accurately depicted vessels, the rest of the landscape around the banks of the river is imaginary and the soft glow of the sky seems more Mediterranean than Northern European. This is a painting that would have appealed to a collector, especially one who shared Storck's knowledge of ships and his romantic vision of the sea.

Style: Baroque
This richly dressed lady, whose identity is unknown, sits behind a parapet against a plain, dark background. Her body is turning slightly away from us and her hand rests on the parapet, making it look as though she might be sitting at an open window. The parapet was a common device in Venetian portraiture of this period in bust-length or three-quarter-length portraits; it positioned the sitter further back in pictorial space and also solved the problem of how to disguise where the lower part of the sitter’s body was cropped.

The lady turns to look to the right. Perhaps she was once looking at a matching portrait of her husband. However, this might simply be the picture of an ideal beauty: such portraits were popular in Venice at this time, particularly by Palma Vecchio, to whom this painting has been attributed in the past. It has also been attributed to Bernardino Licinio, but the condition of the picture makes it difficult to tell for certain who it is by.

Style: High Renaissance
In the foreground stand two archers, one of whom shoots at an unseen target on top of the pole. Behind them are men and women engaged in amorous pursuits. Such encounters in wooded settings, as shown at left and in the background, had become a popular theme in art, inspired in particular by the paintings of Watteau and prints after them.

This is the third in a series of four canvases by Lancret (all in the collection) which represent the Four Ages of Man - 'Childhood', ‘Adolescence’, 'Youth', and 'Old Age'.

Style: Baroque, Rococo
The bright, white gash in the grassy bank on the right is one of the first things to catch our eye in this picture. Though it represents a split in the turf covering a dune, exposing the sand underneath, it also looks like a splash of bleach has stained the landscape white, and that is the subject of the painting.

In the seventeenth century, the bleaching fields of Haarlem, where Jacob van Ruisdael was born, were considered to be the best in Europe. The material worked on was linen, which was far more important than cotton as a fabric for making shirts, underclothes, bedsheets and table cloths. It also produced the incredibly long, fine threads used to make lace, for which the Low Countries were famous. But to fetch the highest prices, linen, which was naturally a dull beige colour, needed to be bleached white.

The process took place in spring and summer to maximise the amount of sunlight. First the linen was steeped in lye, a bleach made by soaking wood ash, and then, for about a week, it was regularly doused with a stronger solution which was heated to boiling point. The cloth was next soaked in buttermilk for five or six days, and finally spread on the grass and kept damp for however many days or weeks it took for the sun to complete the bleaching effect. The whiter the linen, the more valuable it was.

The flat fields and ready water supply in the rivers, canals and ditches around Haarlem were ideal for this process and van Ruisdael painted several landscapes which featured bleaching. This one was probably painted in the late 1640s before he left Haarlem to set up his studio in Amsterdam. Most of those views are more panoramic, looking out across a flat open landscape towards the town. In them, the strips of linen become part of the landscape and the figures are reduced to tiny dots in the fields.

This is a far more enclosed view of a much smaller set-up, apparently located among the large sand hills to the west of Haarlem. A family seems have made a bleaching works just below their cottage. One man stands knee-deep in a ditch full of water, dunking the material with a stick. Another lays it out in strips on the bank next to him, while a woman appears to be overseeing the work.

That sense of enclosure -- a scene tucked away in the dunes and viewed from behind a tree -- gives us the feeling that we are peering into a private world. The dark, gloomy sky helps to build the atmosphere and adds a touch of irony and sympathy. This was a hard life, dealing with caustic substances, and it depended on sunny weather. Rain clouds were the last thing the bleachers would have wanted to see.

Style: Baroque
A pale young man, hands folded in prayer, is engaged in private devotions. The book is presumably a prayer book or a Book of Hours. It has gilded edges and a golden clasp, and the text written in black ink with red rubrics (instructions) and blue initials. The portrait was clearly the left wing of a diptych or triptych. The right hand panel(s) would have displayed a religious image, probably the Virgin Mary and Christ Child.

There is nothing to tell us who the sitter was, though he was evidently wealthy. He wears a red velvet doublet with a black robe over it, the right sleeve of which is folded over above his wrist to reveal a dark grey lining with a damask-like pattern. Both gown and doublet are slashed at the shoulder, allowing white puffs of the shirt to escape. A cross set with sapphires and surrounded by pearls hangs from the gold chain around his neck. His dress and haircut suggest a date of around 1475.

The two coloured marble columns have golden capitals and bases. Although they don't relate convincingly to the figure or the surface on which his book rests, they suggest a luxurious setting. They are comparable to those in Memling's Saint John the Baptist and Saint Lawrence, of before or around 1480. In those, however, the spatial relationships between the young man and his setting are more carefully considered, which could indicate that this painting is rather earlier. It may be dated to the mid-1470s.

Technical analysis shows us that there was underdrawing for the face and neck, probably indicating roughly where the head was to be. The lines in the hands and book are more confusing but probably record various ideas for the placing of the hands, which were narrower at one stage, and for the surface on which the book rests and the book itself, which may once have been larger. The underdrawing resembles that in other portraits by Hans Memling. The final positions of the face, hands and book were all fixed before the artist began to paint; few changes were made at the painting stage. The delicacy of detail and the skill of handling, particularly noticeable in the wet-in-wet passages, is typical of Memling.

Although the figure is in very good condition, the background has been damaged and overpainted. The frame, which is apparently original, has lost its original ground and decoration; the gilded strips are modern. It is not clear what its original decoration would have been. Both the mouldings and the structure of this frame are unusual but have some technical features in common with frames manufactured in Bruges around 1480.

Style: Gothic, Early Renaissance