wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
Willem Duyster was an Amsterdam painter who specialised in small interior scenes and was one of the pioneers of  guardroom paintings, which show off-duty soldiers at rest. This painting of a game of tric-trac, a once-popular version of backgammon, shows his mastery at depicting materials and endowing his scenes with a subtle narrative.

As two men focus intently on the game, a woman chalks the score on the side of the board. A figure in the background sits smoking, lost in contemplation, while another man lights a pipe from a bowl of embers. None of the players look at one another and Duyster has wrapped each of them in their own private mental world. The room in which they sit is well appointed without being luxurious: there is a fine carpet on the table (which carries his signature), coal and wood lie on the floor beneath an elaborate stove, but the room is otherwise modest. The scene is perhaps set in the woman’s house since she wears an apron and is keeping the score.

Duyster painted board and card games many times, and a similar scene in the Hermitage, St Petersburg, shows an all-male company with one of the players wearing a sword, while another in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, has the non-players drinking and playing music. In both pictures one of the characters looks out at the viewer, drawing them in. Some Dutch depictions of games carry a moral message warning against the dangers of gambling and idleness, but this painting is a sober and contemplative image: there is no drink in evidence, nor any sign of gambling. This is a group enjoying the pleasures of company and gentle play.

All but one of the figures are shown in profile which gives the painting a certain formality. However, Duyster skilfully varies the poses of his characters and leads the viewer’s eye in a circle round the cluster of players. The woman’s outstretched leg reaches across to the tuft of trailing carpet to complete the sweep, while her extended arm chalking the score echoes that of the man placing his counter on the board. Such subtleties stop the scene from becoming static.

The pleasures offered by the painting are quiet ones: the comforting familiarity of the game and the clever way Duyster uses the light coming from the left to pick out the sheen of silks and the different textures in the room.

Style: Baroque
The Virgin appears lost in thought as she firmly clutches her son to her. The infant Christ holds an apple in one hand, symbolic of his role as the new Adam, born to redeem mankind from original sin after the Fall.

The red cloth hanging over the bar behind the Virgin has been drawn back to reveal a landscape of pine trees with a fortified town perched on top of a hill and a convent just below and outside the walls. The position of the buildings directly beside the heads of the Virgin and Child suggests that they had a special importance and may represent a real place.

The foreshortened arms of the Virgin's throne probably mean that it was originally placed quite high above the viewer. The marble wall behind the Virgin is also unusual in a small devotional painting and suggests that this is actually a fragment from a larger picture, most likely an altarpiece. Originally, saints probably stood to either side of a raised throne with their heads just rising above the wall. The back of the panel also indicates that it has been cut down, and there is a join, which one would not expect to find in a painting of this size. Usually a small picture would be painted on a single panel. Here the join runs down the left-hand side of the painting where one would expect to find a join in an altarpiece made of three large planks of wood arranged vertically. The wood it is painted on was severely damaged by woodworm, which may explain why the altarpiece was cut down. Equally it may just have been cut to make it more attractive for sale to a private collector.

Morone's Moscardo Madonna in the Museo di Castelvecchio, Verona, has the same composition in reverse. Either the same cartoon was used to make both or a drawing made from one composition was used to make the other. Although there are minor differences in the figures between the two paintings, the backgrounds are completely different. The outlines of the halo, curtain bar and the mouldings of the wall were all incised in the National Gallery’s painting. The painting in Verona does not have these incised lines, which would suggest that it was copied from the National Gallery’s painting.

Morone was one of the leading painters in Verona in the early sixteenth century. The very rich, bright colours and the clear light which sharply illuminates every detail are typical of Veronese art of the period, also apparent in the work of Morando and Gerolamo dai Libri. The painting is not easy to date as Morone’s style seems not to have developed in an obvious way, and works he made in the early 1500s are similar to those he was making over 20 years later. The gilt metal decoration on the wall behind the Virgin and Child can be matched exactly with that in the Sacristy of Santa Maria in Organo in Verona of 1505—1510, a church for which Morone painted an altarpiece in 1503. However the National Gallery’s painting seems a very late work, probably dating from the 1520s.

Style: High Renaissance
This small, evocative painting shows the work of Aelbert Cuyp at the peak of his maturity as an artist. It’s a picture full of light and reflections, transforming a simple view of a river at evening time into visual harmony.

Light puffy clouds, lit here and there by the evening sun, drift overhead, leaving patches of shimmering water below that carry almost perfect reflections of boats, animals and distant trees. The wide curve of the small boat that carries two fishermen is echoed in the sweeping downward curve of the high sand dune on the right, framing the scene between them. Tucked into the shelter of the dune, a herdsman squats on his haunches and one of his animals turns towards him with an enquiring gaze.

The depth of colour is at its richest in this corner of the picture, giving the cows weight and substance, and a warm graininess to the sand dune behind them. You can almost hear the faint splash of a hoof stamping in the water or the swish of a tail as the evening midges begin to bite. In a country greatly dependent on its cattle for its wealth, Cuyp has brought these magnificent beasts close to us, giving them as much character as -- and much more significance than -- the people around them. The evening is so still that the man in the central boat a little way off needs oars as well as a sail to propel him. A glint of sunlight catches the curve of the hull, sweeping on up the arc of the sail.

Several Dutch artists who had been to Italy painted landscapes full of the soft light of the Mediterranean. Cuyp was probably the most important of the artists to be influenced by their work. He transferred this distinctive light to his Dutch scenes, giving them the soft radiance we see in this painting, and in the much larger, more ambitious A Distant View of Dordrecht, with a Milkmaid and Four Cows, and Other Figures ('The Large Dort') and River Landscape with Horseman and Peasants.

English travellers to Holland in the seventeenth century remarked with surprise that butchers, bakers, blacksmiths and cobblers adorned their homes with pictures. John Evelyn, the famous diarist, was surprised at the amount of money that even 'a common farmer' paid for a picture. This small painting might once have hung on the walls of a mansion belonging to a wealthy collector, but it also might have been hung in a humbler house -- one where its theme would have appealed to the owner in a more personal way.

Style: Baroque
This triple portrait was intended as a model for a full-length statue of Armand-Jean du Plessis, duc de Richelieu (1585--1642). He wears the robe and skull cap of a cardinal, a position granted to him in 1622. On a blue ribbon hangs the Order of the Holy Spirit, symbolised by the dove just visible along the bottom edge.

Richelieu became one of the most significant political figures in seventeenth-century Europe, and in 1624 he was appointed Chief Minister to the French King Louis XIII (1601--1643). The head is repeated in this painting in three different poses: facing forward and in profile turned to the left and the right. The central portrait relates to the artist's full-length painting Cardinal de Richelieu, also in the National Gallery.

The painting was executed in Paris and in 1642 was sent to the Italian sculptor Francesco Mochi (1580--1654) in Rome. Mochi's statue was formerly in the Château de La Meilleraye in Poitou, but in 1793, during the French Revolution, the head was removed and is now lost. The remaining statue is in the Musée du Pilori, Niort.

The commission for a full-length statue of Richelieu had originally been granted to the more renowned Italian sculptor, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, but the project was abandoned in 1641 and a bust was made instead. Once in Paris, Bernini's bust was criticised for its poor resemblance to Richelieu, and this was blamed on the inaccuracy of the painted profiles, supplied by an unknown painter, on which Bernini had based his work. Shortly after this, Cardinal Jules Mazarin (1602--1661), soon to become the Minister of France following Richelieu's death, asked the celebrated Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck to provide Bernini with a portrait on which to create the full statue (this artist had supplied Bernini with a portrait for his bust of King Charles I of England). However, Van Dyck died before the commission was confirmed.

Champaigne probably painted the central and right heads; an inscription above the latter reads: 'this is the better one'. The rest of the painting was likely carried out by his workshop, as the costumes lack vitality and accuracy of detail. An earlier high-quality single profile of Richelieu by the artist is now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Strasbourg. Painted underneath it and invisible to the naked eye are several other portraits in varying profiles.

Style: Baroque, Academic
We do not know this man's identity, although he was once thought to be Martin Luther. He wears a white shirt, its collar embroidered with Xs and Os, with a purplish doublet over it. A brown garment, perhaps of fur, is tied across his chest. His black, fur-lined coat may have been overpainted; the background certainly was, but once may have shown parts of a building.

This was once the left wing of a folding diptych or triptych. There are remains of red paint on the reverse, which once may have shown an object against a red background, perhaps a stone figure of a biblical character in a red marble niche.

The portrait has much in common with Bruges paintings of the 1520s attributed to Jan Provoost, Albert Cornelis, Lancelot Blondeel and the Master of the Holy Blood. Because of its condition is it difficult to judge who painted it, but the the nose, seen almost in profile, sits strangely with the rest of the head, turned in three-quarter view. The Master of the Holy Blood in particular tended to distort his faces in a similar way, which makes it probable that is from his workshop.

Style: High Renaissance
Wybrand Hendriks has piled up his bouquet of fruit and flowers against a soft, green background of woodland trees, till it tips sideways and tumbles down the canvas on a steep diagonal, ending in the forms of the two dead birds. They are snipe, game birds to be eaten. An exotic pineapple sits at the top of the arrangement, its weight appearing to have caused the mini avalanche. It's a multisensory painting and evokes the taste, touch and smell as much as the sight of so much abundance.

Although Hendriks includes some simple, domestic flowers and fruit -- bindweed, Sweet William, peony, an apple, a walnut and rosehips -- he concentrates on the exotic. As well as the rare and expensive pineapple, grapes, peaches and a pomegranate crowd together; a melon squeezes into the wicker basket that contains the arrangement. It seems to suggest that it is man's ingenuity as much as nature that is celebrated in the picture: in Europe, most of the fruits could only be grown in a glasshouse. And as a glasshouse and skilled gardeners would only be found in the home of a prosperous person, perhaps wealth is celebrated too.

Hendriks's own skill was in reproducing the many textures -- of leaves, petals, fruit and feathers -- presented in the picture. The leaves alone seem to present a multitude of greens. Some are fresh, as if a breeze still blows them; some curl, tinged with pink, while others have nibbled edges. The succulent pineapple spikes top it all like a crown. The velvety skin of a peach contrasts with the hard, ridged melon rind, and the snipes' downy feathers with the cool, marble shelf on which they lay; the glow of the green grapes compares with the misty film on the purple. Two butterflies -- a red admiral and a six spot burnet -- are featured, perhaps to show Hendriks's knowledge of these creatures, perhaps because such knowledge was fashionable among collectors. An earwig, an ant and a fly are hidden away, to be found with patient looking.

Not all the fruit is edible -- some of the grapes in particular are past their prime. But this wouldn't have been a bar to enjoyment of the picture when it was painted. In the days before refrigeration fruit didn't have to be perfect to be eaten. A hundred years before this painting, artists sometimes used dying fruit and flowers and short-lived insects as symbols of the brevity of life, but in the eighteenth century such a concept was less commonly used. It's likely that Hendriks was simply painting what he saw, perhaps as an allegory of luxury but not as a moral lesson.

Hendriks was an exceptionally versatile artist, producing portraits, landscapes, genre scenes and still-life paintings. He had trained in a workshop that supplied decorative wall paintings for the elegant homes of wealthy art lovers. He was for several years curator of the art collection at the Teylers Stichting, Haarlem (now Teylers Museum). In this still life, Hendriks painted in the manner of Jan van Os, his contemporary, whose work is also represented in the National Gallery's Fruit and Flowers in a Terracotta Vase and Fruit, Flowers and a Fish.

Style: Neoclassical
The optical illusion created by this painting, is a powerful one. Rembrandt has used contrasts between light and dark -- for example, the blacks and whites of the sitter’s clothes, the highlights on her nose, the heavy shadow under her chin and the lighter, subtle greys of her headdress -- to create a highly convincing three-dimensional effect. The old lady’s head seems to project forward out of the picture.

But it isn’t only the light effects which make the portrait seem so lifelike. Rembrandt has evoked the old lady’s blotched, blemished and sagging skin using different textures and thicknesses of paint. The furrows and shadows, the wrinkles and pudginess make her face seem almost tangible. He did this with a lively brush, applying the paint fluidly with short and curving strokes, as well as dabs and stipples.

The painting was made when Rembrandt was 28 years old, soon after he arrived in Amsterdam to set up his own studio. The oval shape was conventional in the city at that time, but the energetic and creative way of applying paint to the canvas represents a significant change in Rembrandt's style from his more smoothly painted portraits of only a year or two earlier. He was clearly excited by the possibilities of his art and keen to experiment.

The painting does not record the sitter’s name, though it does give her age (83), as well as the date it was made (1634) and Rembrandt’s signature. Because of a misinterpreted label on a printed copy of the painting, it was thought for some time to be the artist's grandmother, but about 25 years ago the sitter was identified as Aechje Claesdr. She was the widow of the Rotterdam brewer Jan Pesser (who died in 1619) and one of the leading figures among Rotterdam's Remonstrant community.

The Remonstrants were Protestants, but their beliefs were slightly different from the Calvinist orthodoxy that dominated religion in Holland at the time. In 1619, they were banned from practising and many of their preachers were persecuted. Two of Aechje's sons-in-law were Remonstrant preachers and she had to hide one of them in her house, but she managed to escape persecution herself. In 1634 Rembrandt came to Rotterdam to paint not only Aechje's portrait but also those of her son Dirck and his wife Haesje van Cleyburgh. It may be that the famous preacher Johannes Wtenbogaert, whose portrait Rembrandt had painted in 1633 and who was living in Rotterdam at that time, introduced him to the family.

Aechje’s costume is not a fashionable one for 1634 -- she is dressed in a style which was in vogue during her youth. Over a plain bodice she is wearing a sleeveless coat, or graingat, with large shoulder wings. Her pleated ruff is of moderate size, and she has tied an apron over her coat. Despite her wealth, her clothes are relatively modest -- the only hint of luxury are the three tiny gold pins which hold her two-piece headdress in place.

Style: Baroque
A small, naked figure, supported in a white cloth, is being carried upwards by two angels. Below is part of a roof; above, God the Father sits on a Gothic throne, ringed by angels with multiple wings.

This is the top part of the right wing of an altarpiece that stood on the high altar of the Abbey of St Bertin in Saint-Omer, northern France. The naked figure is the soul of Saint Bertin, whose death scene originally appeared immediately below; he was abbot of Saint-Omer in the late seventh and early eighth century and took part in the conversion of the pagan French tribes to Christianity. The top of the left wing, A Choir of Angels, is also in the National Gallery's collection, while the main parts of the wings, which show scenes from the life of Saint Bertin, are now in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin.

Technical analysis shows us that Simon Marmion was designing or at least adapting these pictures as he went along, and tells us much about his working methods. The circular aureole around God the Father has been drawn with a compass; the hole made by the point is visible in the middle of the draperies in an infrared reflectogram. The horizontal lines of the slates on the roof were incised in the chalk ground, and there are differences between the underdrawing and the final painted version (God's crown is smaller, and there are minor changes to the throne, the figure of Saint Bertin and the angels' draperies).

On the back, the top part of a Gothic stone canopy is painted in grisaille, identical to that on the other wing. The designs were transferred onto each panel by pouncing. The unpainted edges at the tops and sides are original but at the lower edges the paint and ground have been scraped away. This took place in 1822/3 when our fragments were cut off the Berlin panels by a French dealer who thought their unusual shape would have been 'disagreeable' in a picture gallery.

Style: Gothic, Early Renaissance
This is the main panel of the Ansidei Altarpiece that the 22-year-old Raphael painted for the Ansidei family chapel in the Servite Church of S. Fiorenzo in Perugia in 1505.

The Virgin sits in majesty on a carved wooden throne with the Christ Child upright and alert on her lap. A small book is open on her knee and she follows the text she is reading with her finger. She draws her baby’s attention to a passage in the book, presumably containing allusions to his future sacrifice. A string of coral beads ending in jewelled crosses is suspended from the throne and resembles a rosary, a reminder of the blood Christ will shed at the Crucifixion. The Latin inscription at the top of the throne, ‘SALVE MATER CHRISTI’ ('Hail Mother of Christ'), would have acted as a prompt to the recitation of the rosary.

John the Baptist points to the infant Christ and gazes at his rock crystal cross, in foreknowledge of Christ's future death. The older, more contemplative Saint Nicholas, identified by his bishop’s mitre and crosier, withdraws slightly behind the throne. His furrowed brow indicates that he is concentrating on his book. At his feet are three golden balls which represent the purses of gold he gave as dowries to the three daughters of an impoverished nobleman to save them from prostitution. This type of composition, with saints flanking the enthroned Virgin and Child in a unified image, is known as a sacra conversazione ('sacred conversation').

The lower horizontal panel, known as the predella, beneath the main panel of the altarpiece probably depicted two scenes: John the Baptist Preaching and another scene showing a posthumous miracle of Saint Nicholas. Each narrative scene would have been positioned beneath the saint in the main panel to whom it related.

Raphael carefully calculated the geometry of the composition, dividing it horizontally and vertically into harmonious thirds. The picture surface was incised with a grid nine squares wide by six squares high. This suggests that Raphael worked out his scheme in squared composition drawings on paper and then transferred the design to the panel before he began painting.

Technical investigation has revealed that the pale grey architecture and vaulting behind the Virgin’s throne, which provides a sacred space for the figures, was not planned by Raphael from the beginning but was painted over the sky and landscape. Raphael used the pre-existing grid to position the parapet a third of the way up and the mouldings two-thirds of the way up the panel. This explains why this late addition appears so integral to the composition. He may have decided to include the barrel-vaulted architecture in the altarpiece to compensate for the plainness of the Ansidei Chapel.

The Ansidei Madonna is the grandest and most successfully designed of Raphael’s early Madonnas. The painting is closest in style and form to the Colonna Altarpiece (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), which gives an idea of how the Ansidei Madonna would have appeared before Raphael added the architectural backdrop.

Style: High Renaissance