wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
This painting depicts a legendary moment recounted by the ancient Greek historians Herodotus and Plutarch: Solon, an Athenian philosopher and lawmaker, disputes with Croesus, King of Lydia, on the subject of happiness.

Croesus, who was famously wealthy, asked Solon to tell him who was the happiest man in the world, believing it to be himself. He was disappointed to hear Solon’s response that three men had been happier than he: Tellus, an Athenian statesman, who had a good life and died fighting for Athens in a war against the neighbouring Eleusinians; and the brothers Kleobis and Biton, who pulled their mother to a festival in an ox-cart and, following her grateful prayer for their happiness, died in their sleep. Solon’s message was that, contrary to Croesus’ belief, human happiness is dependent not on wealth but on the good fortune of a person’s life overall.

Part of a signature can be made out on the picture: 'TEENW.. K[?]'. This, combined with the subject, point to the specialist painter of church interiors and architectural scenes Hendrick Steenwyck the Younger. But a second artistic style is present in the figures and flowers, suggesting that Steenwyck worked in collaboration with another person. This hand is in the style of Jan Brueghel the Elder, who painted flowers and small-scale landscapes and figures, and frequently collaborated with other artists, including Peter Paul Rubens.

The artists have chosen to depict the moment Solon approaches Croesus as he passes through his palace at Sardis, the Lydian capital. The encounter of the two men, watched by two young boys, is on a raised platform and framed by arches and columns, as if a stage set. Croesus' wealth is emphasised by the grand architecture that dwarfs the figures and by the ostentatious display of riches on every surface: gold plate, porcelain, an elaborate flower display, books, celestial globes and even an exotic parrot.

Style: Baroque
Frederick de Moucheron was one of a number of seventeenth-century Dutch artists who specialised in painting idyllic scenes of people with their animals among the antique ruins of the Campagna (the countryside around Rome). As far as we know he never went to Italy, but conjured up imaginary views from the drawings and sketches of artists who had.

In this painting, a peasant woman sits below three classical columns that support some massive, and rather insecurely balanced, blocks of stone carved in the shape of a sarcophagus. They are perhaps the remains of a Roman temple hundreds of years old. Her animals -- a mixed herd of sheep, goats and cows -- stand or lie quietly, apparently undisturbed by the lively dog that runs towards them. The woman sits upright, holding a baby, while a man with his back to us points towards a sunlit tower overlooking the distant valley. Neither of them seems to notice the rather adventurous dog exploring the fallen masonry under the columns.

The picture was painted shortly after de Moucheron returned to Amsterdam after living in France for several years. His French travels might account for the rather northern-looking pine tree and Lombardy poplars that surround his Roman ruins. It could also be the reason that the scene is bathed in a cool Northern light rather than the soft, golden radiance of most of his landscapes and those by other Italianate artists, like Jan Both and Nicholaes Berchem.

De Moucheron's ruins tower over the people beneath them, with fresh growth sprouting from cracks in the stone. The columns are very slightly off centre, leaning almost imperceptibly to one side -- it's enough to be unsettling, especially with the tomb-like blocks overhead that look in danger of falling. Similarly, in Berchem's Peasants with Four Oxen and a Goat at a Ford by a Ruined Aqueduct, the steep perspective of the aqueduct as it seems to tip away from us is disturbing. In both pictures ruins appear to suggest the grandeur of an almost-vanished civilisation; life in their shadow continues calm and serene, untouched by the glories of the past.

Style: Baroque
The Virgin Mary with the Christ Child on her lap is flanked by two saints. On the left is an old man with a white beard; he wears a ragged white robe tied around his waist with a belt made of a twisted olive branch. This might be Saint Jerome, although he does not have the usual cardinal's hat of that saint, and the olive branch is puzzling.

On the right a younger man is dressed in the grey habit of an observant Franciscan, an austere branch of the mendicant religious order founded by Saint Francis; in England they were known as the Greyfriars. This is the Blessed Bernardino da Feltre, a popular Franciscan preacher and founder of the monte di pietà, a charitable credit organisation which aimed to provide the poor with an alternative to moneylenders charging extortionate interest rates. Like his namesake Bernardino of Siena, Bernardino da Feltre was enormously popular, attracting huge crowds to his sermons in which he railed against vanity, ambition and greed, and encouraged people to burn 'vanities' such as rich clothes, playing cards and dice. Instead of a full halo, a series of golden rays emanate from his head: he was not formally made a saint until 1653. He carries a book, turned on its side so we can see the fore-edges, on which sits a small model of the Holy Sepulchre (Christ's tomb) with Christ in front of the Cross. There's an inscription -- 'INRI' -- on the Cross, the abbreviation of 'Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews', which was pinned there during the Crucifixion.

Seemingly ordinary objects act as religious symbols here. Christ holds a small bird, a goldfinch, in his hand: a goldfinch was thought to have pulled a thorn from the crown of thorns on Christ's forehead when he was on the way to the site of his crucifixion, and so became a symbol of the Passion. The Virgin is holding a small apple, the fruit with which Adam and Eve  were tempted in the Garden of Eden, causing the Fall of Man. In medieval thought the Virgin was seen as the new Eve because she gave birth to Christ, who, through his Incarnation and Passion, brought about humanity's salvation.

The artist, Filippo Mazzola, signed his name along the parapet behind which the holy figures stand. The picture must have been painted between Bernardino da Feltre's death in 1494 and Mazzola's in 1505. Mazzola came from a family of painters based in Parma and  although not himself a great artist, he was the father of one: Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola, known as Parmigianino, a leading Mannerist artist.

Style: Early Renaissance
This is most likely a view of daily life in Venice during the second half of the eighteenth century, rather than an invented capriccio, though the actual site has not yet been identified. The Guidecca, Chioggia and Murano (districts and islands of Venice) have all been suggested.

Men chatting, women doing laundry and an animated boy and his dog give a sense of informality to what is actually a very structured composition. The steeply receding rooflines and the deep shadow cast across the ground lead us towards the waterfront, boats and distant buildings.

Guardi has used very thin paint to describe the foreground buildings which frame the square, with very sketchily dashed off lines giving a sense of windows and stonework.

Style: Neoclassical
Cunera van der Cock married the artist Frans van Mieris about a year before he painted this portrait of her.  About 120 of his pictures still exist, and although Cunera appears in about a quarter of them, very few are actual portraits of her. The rest are genre pictures or tronies (character studies) in which she is playing a role. He features her long, straight nose, pouting lips and small chin, but the moods of the pictures and the characters she plays differ greatly, from the playful Lady in a Red Jacket Feeding a Parrot to the frankly erotic The Oyster Meal, which includes a self portrait that's unflattering and intended to be comic.

This portrait is one of the more serious views of Cunera. She was about 27 years old and had already given birth to their first son, Willem, when it was painted. Seen in profile with her head turned back slightly towards us, she gazes into the distance, her expression perhaps a little wistful. She wears a long, white coif and her clothes appear unassuming and plain. But the jacket into which her white shift is tucked is expensive, made of dark red velvet and white fur, and the hem of the coif is embroidered with fine gold thread. There's just enough restrained but costly decoration to suggest that the family is prosperous; van Mieris was already becoming one of the most successful artists in Leiden, the town in which they lived.

Cunera hides her hair, immaculately combed back under the white coif to reveal her high forehead and arched eyebrows. Van Mieris portrays her as the perfect, modest wife. With almost invisible brushstrokes, he makes her skin glow, soft and almost tangible. He allows one fine tendril of hair to escape the coif to wave down in the shadow on her cheek, and shows the fur reaching up her jacket to rest on her breast.

The picture was originally oval in shape and thought to be painted on vellum (made from calfskin and unusual as a picture support at this time). At some point around the end of the eighteenth century, it was put onto an oak panel to become the small rectangle that exists now. At the same time, an artist less skilled than van Mieris painted over the background. Presumably it was this same artist that lengthened the sleeve and the fur cuff, making the sleeve three-quarter length, a fashion that came in some years after the portrait was painted. Again, the brushstrokes are far less accomplished than van Mieris’s.

Celebrating a wedding or other important event with a pair of portraits was traditional in the seventeenth century. There is a self portrait of van Mieris that is thought to be a pair with this picture (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin), perhaps painted to celebrate Willem’s birth. It’s also an oval and probably on vellum with no later additions. A pupil of Gerrit Dou, who called him ‘Prince of my Pupils', van Mieris belonged to the fijnschilders -- fine painters famous for their flawless finish and precise attention to detail -- in his native Leiden.

Style: Baroque
According to the Gospel of Luke (5: 1--11), Christ one day approached two fishing boats on the Sea of Galilee. After boarding one and preaching from it, he told the fishermen to cast their nets. Although they had worked all night and caught nothing, the fisherman agreed; when they hauled the nets back in, they were near breaking from the bountiful catch. Astounded by this miracle, the fishermen became disciples of Christ.

This is a sketch on paper, intended as a model for an engraving by Schelte à Bolswert. The composition is based on the central panel of a triptych  that Rubens made in 1617--18 for an altar in the church of Notre Dame au delà de la Dyle in Mechelen. It was commissioned by the Mechelen Fishmongers' Guild during a short period of prosperity after a difficult 50 years for the fishing industry. The figures in the central group are depicted in very similar positions in the sketch and triptych panel, although Christ appears rather differently in Rubens’s original picture. There, both of Christ's feet are planted firmly on the floor of the boat and his body is given further solidity by the structure of his robe, which does not billow in the sea air as it does here. The sketch has a landscape orientation, unlike the panel, which allowed Rubens to extend the scene, adding two more figures in the bottom right corner -- they are submerged in the sea, helping to haul the heavy net out of the water. There is also an additional figure in the upper left of the sketch: a man rowing a second boat towards the one in the foreground to help them with their weighty load.

Rubens produced this sketch using chalk or pencil, with the modelling of the figures highlighted with ink washes and some of the features strengthened with pen and ink. Sections of the sketch have been finished off with oil paint. Bolswert’s engraving is relatively faithful to Rubens’s sketch, apart from subtle details such as Christ’s nose, which is straighter, and some of the disciples’ heads, which are more clearly defined.

Style: Baroque
A blue-eyed man with a brown beard gazes past us. He is stylishly dressed. His black hat has pearls in golden settings around the brim and sports a white and black feather, and his black jacket is decorated with twisted golden cords and silver buttons. His red sleeves are slashed and trimmed with golden piping. The date, 1543, appears in the top right-hand corner.

The sitter has been identified from this portrait's resemblance to a drawing in the Musée Condé, Chantilly, which is inscribed 'Monsieur d'Andoins'. There is a close correspondence between the painting and the drawing, although they are not on the same scale and there are other slight differences. In the drawing, his moustache and beard are arranged differently and his clothes have been updated, seemingly reworked to reflect more recent fashions; the painting follows the drawing as it was before being reworked. Another drawing at Chantilly seems to show the same man at a younger age.

The lords of Andoins were powerful nobles of the viscounty of Béarn, south-west France. Their title comes from the village of Andoins, about 10 kilometres east of Pau, the capital of Béarn from the mid-fifteenth century. In the mid-sixteenth century, when this picture was painted, there were two brothers who might have been known as 'Monsieur d'Andoins': Jehannot and Paul. Jehannot may have been born in 1510, was married in 1539 and died in 1545; Paul seems to have been considerably younger. The sitter in this portrait may well be about 35 years old -- Jehannot would have been about this age in 1543, when Paul was probably still in his early twenties.

Jehannot was a soldier and courtier at the French court and on intimate terms with the royal family. The boys' father was ambassador of Navarre and a friend of Francis I, King of France. The boys were brought up with Francis' children and Jehannot married one of the ladies-in-waiting of his wife, Eleanor of Austria.

The artist, François Clouet, followed his father Jean as a highly successful portrait painter at the French court. The collection at Chantilly includes drawings by both father and son; like other artists of the period the Clouets accumulated stocks of drawings for later use. The Chantilly drawings may have been the stock left in François' workshop at the time of his death. The drawing which corresponds to this painting may well be by François himself, while the painting was possibly created in the workshop which he had inherited from his father in 1541.

The picture is painted on an oak board, which was covered with a white chalk ground. Over this is a thin layer of lead white priming. Infrared reflectograms reveal a rather hard, schematic drawing in the face -- probably the result of 'fixing' tracing or pouncing made using a cartoon -- though the drawing of the collar looks freehand.

Style: High Renaissance
It might seem extraordinarily fussy and frilly to us today but, in the early 1660s when this portrait was made, such showy garb was considered -- by some at least -- to be the height of sophisticated dressing, a look inspired by the latest fashions in Paris and employing the most expensive fabrics and tailoring.

Our model wears a black silk coat over a skimpy half-unbuttoned waistcoat known as an 'innocent'. His voluminous white shirt, with its lace-trimmed collar and cuffs, billows out over a pair of voluminous breeches decorated with ruffles and looped ribbons. Below this, ruffles around his shins were created by a pair of wide stockings (canons) which have been folded over garters tied just below the knee. The elongated, square-toed, high-heeled shoes which he proudly points towards us are bedecked with more ribbons, while, to complete the look, he wears a distinctive hat known as a sykerboort (sugar cone). This was in fashion from about 1660 until just after this portrait was made.

Unfortunately we don’t know who the sitter is, though it seems likely that ter Borch painted a pendant portrait of his wife at the same time (now in the Cleveland Museum of Art). She stands in a virtually identical setting at the other end of the same velvet-covered table, with a red, gold tasselled chair behind her. Most likely her husband was a wealthy burgher from the Dutch town of Deventer where ter Borch had settled in 1654, after travelling and painting in many parts of Europe. He had introduced this type of full-length, small-scale portrait where the figure is set against a neutral, simple background in the 1640s. This example, combining flamboyant dress with the rich reds of the velvet furnishings, is one of his most striking and distinctive.

The bearing of the man himself is hard to decode, however. Some viewers have detected a steady gaze and dignified attitude, others find him anxious and overwhelmed by his costume. Perhaps ter Borch wanted to imply a certain amount of ambivalence. Clearly, however, he is a man of status, upright and conscious of demonstrating his social and financial status.

And he was apparently not afraid to alienate some of his more conservative contemporaries. Such ostentatious dressing was not universally approved of in the Netherlands at the time. Though the sitter is careful to respect the formal convention of wearing only black and white, stricter Calvinists (who followed Calvinism, a branch of Protestantism popular in the Low Countries) would certainly have raised their eyebrows at what one contemporary writer referred to as 'immoderately loose and long garments… redolent of over-abundance and profligacy'.

Style: Baroque
There are few greater challenges in art than making the inside of a complicated building seem realistic. The way that our eyes perceive a three-dimensional line of arches receding into the distance, for example, is extremely hard to reproduce in two dimensions. But Pieter Jansz. Saenredam was brilliant at creating such illusions, and his depictions of church interiors were extremely popular in Holland in the mid-seventeenth century.

Between 1634 and 1637, Saenredam made a series of views of the interior of the Grote Kerk (or the Cathedral of Saint Bavo) in Haarlem, the city where he lived and worked -- this is one of them. Even though this is a small picture, it required an enormous amount of work. Saenredam made sketches on site, followed by preparatory drawings based on precise measurements. He would then trace a final version directly onto the panel he was going to paint on.

Despite his care when measuring, he would make significant adjustments to the final painting, usually to emphasise the building's grandeur or to get around difficulties with creating the illusion of perspective. Two original drawings for this painting have survived (they are now in the Haarlem Municipal Archives). By examining these and comparing them with the painting, we can see that he struggled to depict some of the distortions caused by his chosen viewpoint -- one which allows glimpses into a series of complex spaces set at different angles, and seen through arches of different heights at different distances.

In the earlier drawing, he actually gave up his attempts to make one of the arches look right and he didn’t quite solve the problem in the painting. The arch visible through the piers in the top right-hand corner of the painting is left hanging behind the column in the middle of the foreground. He also significantly exaggerated the size of these foreground columns, and deepened the spaces we can see through the arches. As a result the church appears far more monumental, with massive columns and distant vistas. It is an effect exaggerated further by Saenredam’s use of figures -- people are scattered around the church, mostly in the distant background. They are out of scale, significantly smaller than they would have been in real life.

Light floods the building, showing off its grandeur. Despite the fact that there was almost no colour in the church, Saenredam used different shades of grey and white to capture the filtered glow of a bright sunny day to brilliant effect. This also highlights the dark, angular shapes of the boards hanging on the columns. These are coats of arms, marking the location of the gravestones of noble families who were buried under the floor. It was one of the few decorative features surviving in a church which had been stripped of its colourful Catholic paraphernalia only a few decades before.

Style: Baroque
This is an old copy of the original Ecce Homo by Correggio, also in the National Gallery's collection. Christ is shown bound and crowned with thorns at the moment when he is condemned to be crucified by Pontius Pilate.

In the New Testament, 'Ecce Homo' ('Behold the man') were the words used by Pilate when he presented Christ to the people before the Crucifixion (John 19: 2--5). Pilate, wearing a turban, stands in the background, his hand in a rhetorical gesture to indicate that he is speaking. Correggio's Pilate seems to derive from the print of the same subject in Dürer's engraved Passion (British Museum, London).

Christ's mother, the Virgin Mary, swoons and is supported by Saint John the Evangelist, wearing his traditional colours of red and green. The soldier to the right looks at Christ with an expression of respect tinged with love, as though conversion is dawning on him. He may be Longinus, the centurion who recognised Christ's divinity when he was on the Cross.

During Correggio's time, it was common in paintings of this subject to put the viewer in the place of the crowd who condemned him to death -- the position we occupy here, as guilty participants in the torment of Christ. However, the swooning Virgin is not mentioned in the Gospel accounts of this episode and is not usually represented. She scrapes her nails along the parapet as she falls backwards, a detail unique to Correggio's composition.

Style: High Renaissance