wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
This is one of the oldest pictures in our collection. By Margarito d'Arezzo, it shows the Virgin Mary seated on a throne with the Christ Child on her lap, enclosed within an almond shape called a mandorla. Around them are eight scenes of the lives of various saints.

This simple design is striking. The contrast of the gold leaf background with the decorative black borders and the limited use of colour -- red, black, brown and gold -- makes it clear and easy to read. Its horizontal shape resembles altar frontals, paintings placed in front of the altar table and used before altarpieces placed above the altar became more conventional. However, vertical channels on the reverse of our panel probably once held battens, which were inserted into the altar table to secure it -- proving that it sat on top of the altar.

This depiction of the Virgin and Child stresses that Christ is the embodiment of the Old Testament notion of divine 'wisdom' and a spiritual ruler. The carved lions on either side of the throne are intended to bring to mind the throne of the wise Old Testament king, Solomon, described in 1 Kings: 10. In Byzantine art (the art of the Eastern Christian empire), when the Virgin is shown in this frontal pose she is known as the Theotokos ('Mother of God'). This pose and the inclusion of the throne also reflects a tradition of sculpted images of the Virgin and Child in the West, known as the Mary maiestas ('Mary of Majesty') which emphasised her rank and status as the mother of God. The Virgin wears a crown embedded with jewels, and the strips of jewels that hang down alongside her face recall the type of headdress worn by Byzantine empresses. Christ too is depicted with authority: he looks like a small man, not a baby. He makes a blessing gesture with his right hand and holds a scroll -- a reminder that he is the incarnation of logos, the word of God -- in his left.

The scene at the far left of the top row shows the Nativity, followed by Saint John the Evangelist being boiled in a cauldron of oil on the orders of the Roman Emperor Domitian, a torture that he survived. In the following scene, the saint brings a woman named Drusiana back to life. The naked man in the next scene is Saint Benedict, who, having been tempted by beautiful women he saw in Rome, threw himself on the brambles outside his cave in order to overcome his desires.

The bottom row shows the decapitation of Saint Catherine of Alexandria followed by two miracles of Saint Nicholas. On the left he appears to a group of pilgrims and warns them to throw away the oil that was given to them by a nun -- actually the devil in disguise. When they emptied it in the sea it burst into flames. Next, the saint intervenes to save the lives of three innocent men about to be beheaded. In the final scene we see Saint Margaret being swallowed by a dragon and then miraculously bursting out of its stomach, an episode that led to her becoming the patron saint of childbirth.

It seems most likely that the picture was made for a church dedicated to either Saint John the Evangelist or Saint Nicholas, possibly the church of Saint Nicholas in Arezzo.

Style: Gothic
There's a delight in letting your eye wander across the vast landscapes of Koninck's paintings and suddenly coming upon one of the tiny details within. In the foreground here, but still far away, are assorted animals and assorted people, some working, some chatting, some idling away the remaining sunny hours. Away among the trees are churches, pavilions, towers and humbler dwellings. In the shadows there's a bridge crossing a river to a windmill. Further off, the sun catches a lake with a town on its banks.

Koninck was a specialist in these expansive, usually imaginary, landscapes, to which he brought an unprecedented grandeur and tranquillity. The animals and figures here were probably done by Adriaen van der Velde. Artists collaborating like this -- one painting the landscape and another the figures -- was a normal practice at the time.

There are more works by Philips Koninck in our collection, like An Extensive Landscape with a Town in the Middle Distance and An Extensive Landscape with a Hawking Party.

Style: Baroque
This monumental painting depicts sheer animal power. Brilliant light builds up the turbulence and excitement of the scene, and creates a sheen across the horses’ enormous rumps. Rosa Bonheur has made the convulsion of their muscles and their flying manes almost tangible, capturing the rearing, plunging animals and the strength and dexterity of their handlers with almost photographic reality. But she has also captured their spirit and their world, with its noises, smells and sense of danger, and made them into high art.

The diagonal avenue of trees diminishing in size from right to left establishes the extent of the market and leads to the dome of the Asylum of la Salpêtrière in the distance. Horse fairs were held in the Boulevard de l’Hôpital in Paris twice weekly, and for over a year Bonheur attended them, making sketches and absorbing the atmosphere. The magnificent dappled white animals here are Percherons, the strongest kind of horse bred for hauling weights. Bonheur recorded how handlers would manoeuvre their horses into forceful movement so as to demonstrate their strength and mobility to prospective buyers. But we don’t see any buyers in this picture, so the scene appears more wild and uncontrolled than it may have been in reality -- although it was enough for Bonheur to apply for a ‘permission de travestissement’ from the local police. This gave her permission to wear men’s clothes, which she afterwards wrote was ‘a protection to me -- avoiding disagreeable comments from the company… they took me for a little lad.’

While at the horse fair, Bonheur was reminded of the casts she had seen of the marble frieze created to decorate the Parthenon, an ancient Greek temple dedicated to Athena. It shows strong warriors controlling rearing horses, but Bonheur wanted not to imitate them but to interpret them. She also studied the work of Théodore Géricault, a painter of a generation earlier who often depicted horses in traumatic situations and who was the first French artist to visit horse fairs and slaughterhouses. His Horse Frightened by Lightning is also in the National Gallery's collection.

The original painting of The Horse Fair was almost four times as large as this version, causing a sensation at the 1853 Paris Salon. It remained Bonheur’s largest and most ambitious work and is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. This original image brought fame to the artist, at a time when the work of women artists was largely disregarded by critics and collectors alike. She was a well-known and successful ‘animalier’, or animal painter, before the original version of  The Horse Fair was painted, but when that work toured Britain and the US she became an international celebrity.

Bonheur was asked to produce a smaller version to facilitate the making of prints for sale, and some years later the picture was bequeathed to the National Gallery. Unhappy with its condition she offered to make yet another version, but the National Gallery was unable to accept it for legal reasons. Bonheur restored the picture instead, signing it as her own -- it is this painting you see in the Gallery today.

Style: Realist
This little scene, full of lifelike detail, comes from a series of panels that tell the story of the life of John the Baptist. They once formed a predella, the lowest part of a multi-panelled altarpiece.

The saint has just been born; his head is framed by a large golden halo. He is propped up on his wet-nurse’s knee, his arms wrapped around her neck. His mother Elizabeth sleeps in the large bed behind, the shape of her legs visible under the covers. Her golden halo blends into her gilded bedstead which, like the foot of the bed, is decorated with little figures playing musical instruments. These are probably angels; their costume resembles those of angels in religious paintings of this period. Beds painted with religious subjects still survive -- there is one painted with a scene of the Virgin and Child in the Ospedale del Ceppo in Pistoia.

The story of John the Baptist's birth is recorded in the first chapter of the Gospel of Luke. His father Zacharias, shown here as an old man, received a vision when he was making an offering in the temple. An angel appeared and told him that he and his wife would have a son and they would call him John. Zacharias was amazed: he and Elizabeth had never been able to conceive and were now both elderly. The angel punished him for his disbelief, saying, 'you will be silent and unable to speak until the day that these things come to pass, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time.'

As he couldn't speak, we see Zacharias writing John’s name in the book resting on his knee. According to the Gospel account, it was very unusual that they called him John, a name not used by their family. It was more common to name a son after his father. Here, however, Zacharias fulfils the words of the angel Gabriel. By including this detail Giovanni di Paolo makes reference to the divine nature of John’s birth without having to include the scene of Zacharias’s angelic vision.

The artist has arranged the scene in a similar way to images that show the birth of the Virgin Mary, which were often -- like this -- painted on a small scale. The furnishings of the room are positioned at an awkward angle -- the wall that includes the chimney converges with the foot of the bed to form a narrow 'V' -- but this allows the artist to include the painted bed and the fire where the maid dries a cloth. On the floor next to her are the gilded jug and basin that have been used to wash the baby. An archway at the back of the room leads through to further open doorways, giving the impression of the other rooms in the house.

One of the most striking elements of the picture is Zacharias's gracefully rippling blue drapery. Technical analysis shows that the artist drew this spontaneously freehand, directly onto the prepared panel, before painting over it.

Style: Gothic, Early Renaissance, International Gothic
Steen’s paintings of everyday life in seventeenth-century Holland are nearly always humorous in tone. This tiny picture, which is smaller than a sheet of A4 paper and was probably made when Steen was in his mid-twenties, is no different.

An old woman screws up her eyes as she tries to read a text with a pair of glasses offered to her by a pedlar. The man in blue is clearly amused by her struggles and, catching our eye, invites us to laugh with him. The three figures on the right also form a vignette illustrating the three ages of man: the curiosity of the young girl, the confidence of the man at the peak of life and the declining powers of the old woman.

This painting seems originally have been part of a pair which illustrated interactions between travellers and villagers. At the end of the eighteenth century it was sold with a companion piece (since lost) which showed a fortune teller.

Style: Baroque
There are lots of examples in Dutch seventeenth-century painting of artists using images of sleeping women for satirical purposes -- to emphasise neglect of their moral duties (like in Jan Steen's A Man blowing Smoke at a Drunken Woman). That is not the case here. Van Brekelenkam was more concerned with paying homage to diligent housekeepers: this woman has clearly not fallen asleep through drunkeness, laziness or neglect but because she is tired from work. Her kitchen is neat and ordered and she has laid out supper on a neatly pressed linen cloth. Her domestic chores done, she has nodded off while studying the Bible.

One slightly jarring note is hinted at, however. The relief on the stoneware jug shows Adam and Eve standing before God in the Garden of Eden. It is a reminder that, according to the Bible, it was a woman, Eve, who first disobeyed God and brought shame and sin into the world.

Style: Baroque
Jacob van Ruisdael painted many landscapes, but few marine pictures; the ones he did make are all simply views of the sea off the coast of Holland, with small sailing vessels usually in a wind varying from fresh to gale force. He didn't portray the great naval and merchant vessels that filled Dutch waters at the time, nor did he show battles or other important naval events.

Earlier painters often gave a metaphorical meaning to their marine pictures, such as the 'voyage of life' or 'ship of state', but it's unlikely that van Ruisdael was doing so. This would suggests that his marine paintings were made for private patrons or for the open market rather than company or municipal commissions (for which a metaphorical meaning with a moral message might be appealing).

In this painting a small sailing vessel, probably a kaag (an inshore ferry boat), is driven before a fresh breeze under a vast, stormy sky, with a couple of passengers bundled up against the cold. A patch of blue sky suggests that the storm is passing, but it appears that the little boat will be under the clouds for a while as it races along, keeping up with them. The vessel's honey-coloured sails soften the starkness of the scene, making it seem an everyday journey that travellers by sea would be used to. The white sails of the boats speeding away from us give a sense of exhilaration rather than bleakness or danger. The motif of the waves breaking over the pilings of a jetty is repeated in many of van Ruisdael's marine pictures.

Only one drawing of a marine subject exists by van Ruisdael, but his colleague Allart van Everdingen made several. Van Ruisdael used van Everdingen's many sketches of Scandinavian landscapes as an inspiration for his own pictures of mountains and waterfalls; he may have used the marine sketches as a source as well.

Van Ruisdael's early marine paintings seem to have been influenced by Jan Porcellis and Simon Vlieger, two successful marine artists who changed an earlier style of bird's eye views -- rather like maps with ships on them -- to more realistic scenes. In these new pictures, as a means of suggesting distance, the horizon was lowered and the sea in the foreground was usually dark, with a band of light catching the waves and the important vessels in the centre, and another darker band out towards the horizon -- as van Ruisdael has done in this picture. Later he abandoned this device for a less precise demarcation of the dark lines with a more even distribution of light, giving a feeling of a more immense space and elemental power to the scene -- as in Sailing Vessels in a Stormy Sea on a Rocky Coast (private collection, Vienna).

Style: Baroque
Jan de Reus is about 70 years old in this portrait. He looks out from a dark background, his lined face framed by the long curls of a full-bottomed wig. Each wrinkle is rendered with meticulous care. His mouth is sensitive, though the lips are perhaps not as clearly defined as they once would have been. His deep brown eyes are sunk back in his head but they seem to radiate intelligence, maturity and wisdom. It seems as if Nicolaes Maes has painted the picture as a celebration of old age.

De Reus was an eminent Rotterdam citizen -- burgomaster (or mayor) eight times and from 1658, and for some years a director of the Dutch East India Company. This powerful trading organisation was the source of the extraordinary prosperity enjoyed by Holland during the seventeenth century. Its tentacles spread across Africa and the Pacific to the East Indies, importing spices, textiles, ivory and other luxury goods that made Holland and merchants, like de Reus, wealthy.

Perhaps it’s surprising, then, that de Reus chose to be painted in informal dress, rather than in the heavy black coat and high collar that is often seen in pictures of other important Dutch men at the time. But this was a new style in portraiture made fashionable by the Flemish artist Anthony van Dyck, whose new and innovative techniques Maes had adopted for his portraits and which influenced portrait painting for over 150 years. The old man's white shirt rolls over casually at the neck and his soft, silk robe is loosely held across his chest with a single clasp. His fashionable moustache turns up friskily at the tip and he sports the tiny 'Van Dyck' scut of beard under his chin.

The hands too, seem to owe to Van Dyck, who was known for painting hands with long, elegant fingers, often caught in an action that revealed the character of a sitter (as in Portrait of Giovanni Battista Cattaneo). The hand catching the light in Maes’s picture seems younger than de Reus’s face, less veined and gnarled than a 70 year-old's hand might be expected to be. The flesh of the wrist looks firm under the plain, turned-back cuff. He tucks his thumb into his robe and a fringe of the garment tickles his finger in a playful way.

Van Dyck flattered his sitters but, apart perhaps from the hands, in this portrait it would appear that Maes has returned to lessons learned from Rembrandt, his teacher. Rembrandt painted what he saw unflinchingly, as he did in his Portrait of Jacob Trip. He esteemed his aged sitters, as Maes does in this portrait. De Reus doesn’t need flattery because Maes shows him as he was: a man of great integrity, with a long and valuable experience of life. Like Rembrandt, Maes was interested in proving that there is dignity and beauty in old age.

Style: Baroque
Structurally and thematically, this picture is similar to one of Teniers's best-known paintings, Kitchen Interior (Mauritshuis, The Hague), which shows a seated woman peeling apples in a cavernous kitchen with a still life of fruit, pots and a panoply of dead game to her right and a dog to her left.

In the National Gallery version she sits, a model of demure virtue, alone with her faithful greyhound. The setting is a much more modest outhouse. A pile of gleaming pots and pans forms the still life, and a butter churn sits in the background gloom. Close examination of the painting style suggests that it may be by a follower of Teniers, possibly his brother Juliaen.

Several of the pans and some of the furniture, including the butter churn, reappear in another painting in the National Gallery's collection, Teniers’s An Old Peasant caresses a Kitchen Maid in a Stable.

Style: Baroque
Saint Cecilia, patron saint of musicians, sits serenely at a table, holding a palm -- the symbol of her martyrdom --  in one hand and a sheet of music in the other. On the left is a portable organ, on the right an angel leans on a harp and a third figure looms in the shadows, peering around a curtain. In the top right corner we can glimpse the upper parts of a classical temple emerging from behind some trees, a reminder that this saint lived in third-century Rome.

According to legend, Cecilia came from a Roman noble family. In spite of her vow to remain a virgin, her parents arranged for her to marry a young man named Valerian. On her wedding night, Cecilia told her new husband that she was protected by an angel who would kill him if he touched her. When Valerian demanded to see the angel, she sent him to be baptised by Pope Urban I. On his return, he found his wife with an angel, who gave her a crown of roses and him a crown of lilies: here Saint Cecilia is shown wearing a coronet of red and white roses in addition to her halo.

This picture is an early work by Pietro da Cortona, datable to before he became the principal painter of the powerful Barberini family. A painter, sculptor and architect, Cortona was one of the most influential and prolific figures of the Roman High  Baroque. He was particularly admired for the extraordinary illusionistic effects he created in the large fresco schemes that decorated many of Rome's churches and palaces. Saint Cecilia is one of a small number of works stylistically linked with his frescoes in the Palazzo Mattei in Rome, datable to shortly before 1624--5. The saint's facial type and draperies are very close to those in the frescoes, as are the warm palette and fluid paint handling.

In the early 1620s, at around the time this picture was painted, Cortona was in contact with the antiquarian Cassiano dal Pozzo, secretary to Cardinal Francesco Barberini. Dal Pozzo became Cortona's intellectual friend and mentor and encouraged him to study the sculpture and architecture of imperial Rome -- Cortona's early works include a profusion of classical architecture and other references, such as the temple seen in the background here.

Saint Cecilia was once thought to be by  Domenichino, an attribution which goes back as far as the eighteenth century, when it was in the collection of a Scottish nobleman, Sir Robert Udny. The painting was later considered to be by an unknown Roman painter, but is now correctly attributed to Pietro da Cortona.

Style: Baroque, Academic
On the banks of a wide meandering river, men and women are catching fish. The brightly lit woman in red standing in the left foreground draws our eye to her companions, who are mostly shaded by the black cloud looming overhead. A man with a rod and a basket of fish sits next to the river with his back to a large mossy rock. His dog has been alerted to something in the water but the fishing line is slack -- perhaps the fisherman is just about to get a bite. A second woman leans against the rock, her head in her hand, while another man reclines on the ground and a third leans over beside the water.

Vernet has placed another two fishermen, one wearing a coat of a darker shade of red, on a rock projecting out into the river to draw our eye further into the distance. A third group of figures with a boat are depicted as simple grey silhouettes beyond the classical building that resembles a church or temple on the right-hand riverbank in the middle ground. This building, with its echoes of the Pantheon in Rome, appears again 22 years later at the left of Vernet's A Landscape at Sunset, as well as in other paintings by him. The artful reuse of different combinations of motifs for his imagined scenes was one of the hallmarks of Vernet's work. In the far distance a sunlit town stands on top of a crag and another very distant hill is silhouetted blue against the sky. The style of the classical building and the hilltop town with its tall tower suggests that this tranquil scene is intended to evoke an idealised vision of the Italian countryside. The composition does not represent an identifiable place and is broadly similar to other paintings by Vernet of the period.

The tall, thin tree jutting from the left foreground creates a strong diagonal to both emphasise and contrast with the other diagonals that Vernet has used to construct his composition. The tree and the figures on the right frame the scene and draw the eye into the picture -- a compositional device commonly used by landscape painters and known in French as a 'repoussoir'. The huge rocky cliffs to either side of the river act like the wings of a stage set to create the impression of the landscape receding into depth. The effect of distance is enhanced by the zigzag of the river between the rocky banks and also by Vernet's accomplished use of aerial perspective. The golden light low on the hilltop town and on the women in the foreground suggests that this may be early morning or late evening -- the best times of day for catching fish.

The forbidding rocks and angular trees show the influence of Salvator Rosa, but the soft light, calm sky and restful appearance of Vernet's figures creates an atmosphere that is quite different to Rosa’s work. Soon after the painting was bequeathed to the National Gallery in 1879, it was described by The Times newspaper as 'nature, but nature looked at through the light of previous art -- Claude and Gaspar Poussin in particular.'

Style: Romantic