wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
This painting shows the Virgin Mary as Queen of Heaven: she sits on on a gilded throne and two angels hover above her, about to place an extraordinarily delicate crown on her head. The throne is decorated with red and green enamel or glass, and rests on the dais of a small Gothic church.

The Virgin is richly dressed, in a purple-red mantle, edged with gold embroidery and rows of pearls, and a blue dress lined with grey fur. The infant Christ, a string of coral beads around his neck, plays with the book held by his mother, pulling on the red book mark. The pair are serenaded by angels who stand to either side of the throne playing a lute and a harp. The luxurious carpet -- an item of very great value in northern Europe in the sixteenth-century -- is probably based on a real rug. Look closely and you can see how the artist has suggested ​its texture: the pattern is rendered in darker colours, ​with small dots modelled in lighter hues to indicate the texture ​of the knots. Parts of the design are Turkish, but the curving outer border is of a type not found in Turkish carpets: it is more Persian in style. It maybe from a region of eastern Turkey or western Iran.

Quinten Massys knew a great deal about fifteenth-century Netherlandish painting. The composition, particularly the two musical angels, refers back to the much-copied Virgin and Child in an Apse with Two Angels - there is a version in our collection - while Christ playing with his mother's book and the flying angels are reminiscent of another much-copied image, Duran Virgin by Rogier van der Weyden.

At first glance it seems that Massys has created an illusion of space and symmetry, but on closer inspection you can see that both are subtly distorted. The figures are all on different scales: the Virgin is massive and evidently intended to dominate the tiny church, while the flying angels are not much bigger than Christ. The central vertical axis lies between the Virgin's eyes, but the church is left of centre, while the dais and throne are right. The carpet, a visually important item, is not central on the dais, the flying angels are shifted to the right and the standing angels are not in the same plane. The overall impact is both disturbing and fascinating, and the strange broken colours enhance the impression of mystery. The painter seems to have been keen to create a devotional work of great complexity that would encourage careful and repeated viewing.

The rather solemn Christ Child may have a more serious task than apparently playing with the bookmark: he is perhaps reading and marking the Old Testament prophecies which will determine his fate. His bookish interests may perhaps have appealed to two of the painting's former owners, both noted book collectors: the Revd Walter Sneyd (who died in 1888) of Keele Hall, Staffordshire, and Charles Dyson Perrins (who died in 1958), whose fortune came from Lea and Perrins Worcestershire sauce. The painting is generally in good condition, although the red lake glazes on the Virgin's mantle have faded unevenly.

Style: High Renaissance
Fécamp is a fishing town on the Normandy coast around 35 km north-east of Le Havre and 60 km north-west of Rouen. This part of the coast is known for its high limestone cliffs, giving it the nickname of Côte d'Albâtre (Alabaster Coast). Chintreuil visited the area in 1861 and painted a number of open air oil studies on paper, including this one, which was later stuck down on canvas. Pinpricks in each corner of the paper suggest it was painted on site.

The vertical format of the picture is rather unusual for a landscape, but it allows Chintreuil to focus on the structure of the rocky coastline, from which the small houses seem to emerge. The very high horizon prefigures a compositional device used by Pissarro and Cezanne.

Chintreuil studied in the studio of Delaroche from 1842, but it was Corot, whom he met the following year, who encouraged him to paint outdoors. Normandy was a popular painting location for artists including Boudin and Impressionist painters, such as Monet, who had been working there since the mid-1850s. Although not an Impressionist, Chintreuil was similarly interested in capturing light and atmosphere.

Style: Realist
This beach may be at Scheveningen, close to The Hague, where Jacob Maris settled in the 1870s. A lone fisherman appears to be hauling nets alongside two beached flat-bottomed fishing boats. A few birds are the only sign of wildlife.

Maris painted the scene, particularly the sky, with broad visible stokes that are characteristic of his late work. The tracks of the brush’s bristles in the thick paint help create an impression of agitated windswept clouds and of breaking waves on the shoreline. Colours are mainly limited to ochres, greys and browns for the sandy beach, with a narrow band of indigo blue to indicate the sea.

Despite the small size of the canvas, Maris has created a sense of expansive space, in part by giving over most of the picture to the sky. Here he was following the precedent of other northern European artists, especially Dutch painters such as Jan van Goyen and Jacob van Ruisdael.

Style: Impressionist
This panel comes from the Benedictine abbey at Liesborn in Westphalia. The scene may have been inspired by the central panel of the altarpiece made by the same artist for the abbey's high altar, fragments of which are also in the National Gallery's collection.

Its horizontal shape suggests that it might have been made as a predella (the lowest part of an altarpiece). The crucified Christ is flanked on either side by saints. On the left are Saints Scholastica, Mary Magdalene and Anne, and finally, closest to Christ, the Virgin Mary. Saint Anne cradles a miniature Virgin and Christ Child in her arms in reference to her conception of Mary.

Saint John the Evangelist stands immediately to the right of Christ. He is accompanied by Saints Andrew, Benedict and  Agnes. Saint Andrew carries the X-shaped cross upon which he was martyred, and Saint Agnes is accompanied by a lamb, her attribute (her name means 'lamb' in Latin).

Style: Gothic, Early Renaissance
These three men are probably the painter brothers Antoine, Louis and Mathieu Le Nain: their noses and chins suggest a family resemblance. The costumes, with their broad collars, suggest a date of the late 1640s or early 1650s, but if this is a portrait of the brothers it cannot be later than 1648 -- the year Louis and Antoine died. Their deaths may explain why the painting was not completed.

This unfinished work gives us an insight into the artist's painting process. The bodies, limbs and clothing were initially sketched in with rough brown outlines. The face of the man on the right reflects an earlier painting stage, as shown by his sketchy appearance and pale complexion. Detail and texture was added later, as can be seen in the delicate line of buttons on the sleeve of the man on the left, the shimmery satin fabric and the wavy hair. There are different levels of finish in the painting: the artist seemingly worked from left to right, painting faces first then the lovely jacket with its satin sheen, but not filling in the details of the other figures.

When the National Gallery acquired this work it was thought to be by a follower of the Le Nain brothers. It was previously called A Trio of Geometers because it had been overpainted, and geometrical instruments and a globe had been added in the right foreground. Cleaning in 1968 removed these items and revealed that the picture is unfinished.

The picture reveals part of an earlier composition: the head of a boy on the right and the colourful blue and yellow drapery emerged when the overpaint was removed. The results of the cleaning meant that the painting is now thought to be a genuine Le Nain. X-ray images have also revealed that this scene was painted over the portrait of a seated woman. It was common for canvases to be reused in the brothers' studio. .

The National Gallery owns several other works attributed to the brothers: The Adoration of the Shepherds and Four Figures at a Table.

Style: Baroque
The sun sets roughly in the centre of the picture, behind two tree trunks. The thick yellow paint expands from the sky to the foreground, and Monticelli has applied it using short, directional brushstrokes which allow him better to convey the light. Portions of the wooden panel used as a support are left partly visible, especially along the borders, to play a part in the final image. In fact, the warm tone of the support gives vibrancy to the composition.

This is a companion piece, or pendant, to the artist's Sunrise. Both works are typical of Monticelli's later style, and the subjects are characteristic of his Provençal landscapes. This landscape was probably painted outdoors, in the last years of the artist's life, around 1882–4.

Style: Impressionist
Teniers brings the cycle of the seasons full circle -- and his series of paintings of the seasons to an end -- with an old man representing Winter. Wrapped in velvet and fur, he hunches over to warm his hands at a brazier. His face is lined and wrinkled, his beard long and frosted with white. But his cap with its fur wings gives an impression of speed and strength, like a winter wind. A flagon of wine and a full glass await him on the table.

At first the background suggests a grey walled room with a stone floor, but the misty figures low down are a small, monochrome skating scene. The old man's chair tips slightly sideways -- he is perhaps on a path at the side of a frozen pond.

Style: Baroque
An elegant and fashionably dressed young lady is absorbed in writing a letter. She holds a quill pen. A pen case on the table is attached by brownish strings to a dark brown inkpot, which casts an almost pure azurite shadow across the table cloth. We can't read what she is writing -- the artist doesn't seem to have intended it to be legible.

We don't know who the sitter is, but the style of her dress suggests that the picture was painted in around 1530. Her clothes are very similar to those shown in two paintings attributed to Jan Sanders van Hemessen: Young Woman weighing Gold (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin) and Young Woman playing a Clavichord (Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts). It has been suggested that the subject of these two paintings is the young Margaret of Parma, and that our painting might be a copy of a lost third portrait of her.

The three paintings share other features: in all the woman has a very high forehead, an enormously thick neck and rather small hands. However, they are probably not portraits, but studies from life of young women masquerading as Saint Mary Magdalene. In both the Berlin and Worcester paintings there are large covered goblets made of gilded and elaborately ornamented metal. They probably stand for the covered pot that is Mary Magdalene's attribute. Similar paintings of fashionably dressed young women, who write or play instruments and whose pots identify them as the saint, are attributed to the Master of the Female Half-Lengths.

Similarities with a signed painting by van Hemessen, The Holy Family with Saints Elizabeth and John the Baptist (Alte Pinakothek, Munich), confirm the connection with him. Our painting is not by the artist himself, but it seems to follow a lost original. It may have been painted in his workshop, about which little is known. It cannot be by his daughter, Catharina van Hemessen as she was a child when it was painted.

The painting has been cut on all four sides and is possibly a fragment from a larger composition, perhaps originally including another figure.

Style: High Renaissance
Paintings of life on the frozen waterways of Holland during the Little Ice Age were very popular with collectors at the time. Many artists, usually known for painting rivers or landscapes, produced them, and Adriaen van de Velde was one of the most successful.

But in this painting he has concentrated on individual characters and their activities rather than details of the icy landscape. He has shown little to suggest the freezing conditions, except the touch of frost on brittle grass to the left, the runners rather than wheels on two or three vehicles and a couple of people hunched up or cloaked. The landscape might be a river, or possibly a wide plane; the shadows don't have the shimmer of frozen reflection that ice might have.

Perhaps the warmth in the sun, which make the faces and the clothes of the men on the right glow, is what takes the edge off the chill. It’s as if van de Velde couldn’t resist making his sky soft and radiant, in the manner of Dutch artists who had been to Rome and whose style he adopted. The horizon is low, making the sky vast and allowing him to bring the vivid detail of his figures close to us. Compare this with the crowded, wintry scenes of Hendrick Avercamp, such as A Winter Scene with Skaters near a Castle. In Avercamp's painting, the view is largely imagined; in this picture, the distant outline of the Grote Kerk of Haarlem with its spindly spire is recognisable, and a nearby windmill breaks the skyline.

The men in the foreground play kolf, the forerunner of golf. People of all ranks could take part, and it was guaranteed to draw onlookers to give opinions and advice. The player with jaunty red tassels on his petticoat breeches takes aim to hit the post put in position by the man just peeping out from behind him. In the centre, a man with a bag slung on a stick over his shoulder stops to watch, and a young lad -- one of the coldest looking figures, hands stuffed in his pockets and a hint of snow on one boot -- watches with his kolf stick at his side, as if longing to join in.

Two women, one bundled up in a black shawl against the cold, her face hardly visible, ride in a heavy, boat-shaped sledge; a man in a ragged jacket, a skullcap and an apron strains to shove it forward. Behind him a woman in a white bonnet shares the task, but relaxes for a moment to stare out at us, almost smiling. In front of the sledge a second woman reaches forward as if running to catch something -- perhaps the lively little dog yapping at some of the kolf players. The single fine line of black paint that seems to start under her apron, passing behind the gawping lad to the sledge, suggests that she is bearing the brunt of hauling the heavy sledge over the ice.

Style: Baroque
Age has not been kind to this lyrical evocation of the Roman Campagna (the countryside around the Italian city). Parts of it are now obscured, but what remains is a reminder of Jan Both's skill in depicting the Italian landscape.

The sky, the blue-grey distance and the delicate leaves of trees whose branches reach up to the clouds are visible; we can make out a stretch of water and some of the pink rocks of the cliffs on the right. In the centre, the peasants are at the turn in a path. One man pushes his laden mule up the slope towards us. A girl mounted on a mule, her white neck scarf just visible below her dark hair, is about to turn to follow him. Following her, another man heaves at a mule, his back to the direction of travel and a whip in his hand. The animal's head is stretched forward awkwardly, lifted in protest. Its load and the load of the mule behind it seem more than one creature could possibly carry -- great bales heaped high on their heavy wooden saddles, with bulky panniers hung on either side.

Here and there, just a tiny piece of foliage or a strangely shaped rock are delicately and realistically painted. But one small section seems to shine out among the darkened foliage, almost making a small picture on its own. Set apart from the others, in the distance, a man in a dark waistcoat and white shirtsleeves hunches forward on his mule, his hat pulled over his eyes. He’s little more than an inch high, but he’s caught in a patch of dying sun. The pair travel away from us, ambling along the path that winds round the cliff side, rocks above them, rocks below them.

Both was a Dutch artist who lived for a while in Rome. He went out into the Campagna to make sketches and drawings that he kept for his return home to Utrecht. There, he painted his landscapes in the studio and, with the low soft light that pervades them, they seem to radiate a memory of the warmth of Italy.

Style: Baroque
This painting, for some time thought to be by an unknown artist, is now considered to be by Jacob van Ruisdael, the leading Dutch landscape painter of the seventeenth century. The rocky hillside lit with patches of sunlight from the broken, scudding clouds overhead is typical of van Ruisdael's work.

The trees outlined against the sky and tossing in the wind create a dramatic sense of movement, which gives a sense of endurance to the two figures, a man and a child hand in hand. They are dwarfed by nature but steadfastly climb the steep path to the cottage hidden in the woods.

There are about 20 paintings by van Ruisdael in the National Gallery's collection, both landscapes and seascapes -- for example A Landscape with a Ruined Castle and a Church, one of his most famous landscapes, and Vessels in a Fresh Breeze.

Style: Baroque
As punishment for revealing the future to mankind, King Phineas of Thrace was blinded, suffered the sorrows and pains of old age and had his food continually stolen and spoilt by the harpies. Half human and half bird, the harpies were the spirits of sharp gusts of wind. Because Phineas could see the future, he knew that his brothers-in-law Zetes and Calais, who were both travelling with the Greek hero Jason on his ship the Argo, were destined to deliver him from the harpies.

A naked woman points to the sky as Zetes and Calais, the winged sons of Boreas, the god of the north wind, put down food as bait to catch the harpies. King Phineas stands to the right, beside the female figure of Fortune, pointing upward as two young Boreads launch themselves into the air to do battle with the dragon-like creatures circling in the clouds. A third winged figure, wearing a lion skin, swoops down from the top.

The story is told in the Argonautica, an epic romance written by Apollonius Rhodius during the third century BC. It also appears in Virgil's Aeneid (Book III) and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (Cantos 33 and 34). Iris, the wife of Zephyrus, the god of the west wind, persuades the sons of Boreas not to kill the harpies in return for a promise from them that they would never return. King Phineas then tells Jason and the Argonauts how to continue safely on their journey. Paolo Fiammingo's Landscape with a Scene of Enchantment may show Odysseus and his men delayed from their journey on the enchantress Circe's island.

Both canvases may once have been part of a larger series of perhaps six or more paintings. They are very large -- over two metres wide and almost two metres high -- and were probably made to decorate a Venetian palace, possibly the Palazzo Vendramin on the Grand Canal. Such a series of paintings would have decorated the upper walls of a whole room, like wallpaper today. When decorating walls elsewhere in Italy, it was usual to paint directly on the plaster, a technique known as fresco. However fresco was not suited to the damp climate of Venice, and so large canvases like these were painted instead. These pictures were painted exceptionally hastily using only a limited range of colours, probably because they were intended as interior decoration rather than as gallery paintings.

The pigment smalt, used for the blue of the sky, has discoloured and turned a greenish-grey, and some of the green foliage has darkened. The paint may have been prepared quickly or without proper care. There are also many pentimenti -- areas in which Paolo Fiammingo painted over parts of the composition when he changed his mind. The number of these changes also suggest that he was painting quickly without much initial planning.

Style: High Renaissance
Van der Aack's picture was painted in 1655, some seven years after the ending of the Thirty Years' War -- one of the most destructive and brutal conflicts in European history, caused in part by a struggle for power between Catholic and Protestant countries. At the end of it, the Northern Netherlands had become the Calvinist (a strict form of Protestantism) Dutch Republic.

The old woman's plain dress and her neat hair under a spotless white cap echoed in the long pointed collar suggest the modest costume of a woman following the Calvinist religion. She will have sewn her own garments and her large, capable hands, supported on her sewing cushion, are making another garment or household object. Her scissors sit on the table. The table is covered with a plain cloth unlike the expensive turkey carpet of a well-to-do household, as Nicolaes Maes shows in A Little Girl rocking a Cradle; this may be a choice rather than a necessity. The lemon, an expensive luxury item, is prominently displayed with the silver-handled knife the old woman has presumably used to peel it. A lemon can sometimes be a symbol of purity, or sometimes was used as a practical protection against hostile forces such as poison, magic or the plague. In any event, it is also an opportunity for van der Aack to display his skill in painting detail and texture.

We don't know who the woman is, or if the painting was intended as a portrait or is a sympathetic -- if stereotypical -- representation of age and femininity. What is unusual, and seems a confirmation of the woman's piety and strict religious views, is the picture on the wall behind her.

Van der Aack has included a copy of a portrait of Christian, Duke of Brunswick (1599--1626), a Protestant general who fought for a while for the United Provinces, which became the Dutch Republic. He was a violent Protestant partisan who saw himself as 'friend of God and enemy of the (Catholic) priests'. The original painting was by Michiel van Miereveld and the same picture appears in Jan Davidsz. de Heem's Interior with a Young Man seated at a Table (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford). So it would appear that the Duke was an icon for the Protestant religion; perhaps the old woman -- whether a real person or simply a type -- is a serene, but usefully occupied, feminine icon offered as an example to others.

Style: Baroque