wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
This scene, of a tailor and his apprentices hard at work on a platform in front of the window, proved to be a popular one with Brekelenkam's clients. He painted similar scenes many times, as well as others depicting weavers, spinners and seamstresses -- all trades which thrived as part of Leiden’s prosperous seventeenth-century textile industry. At the time, the city, where he lived and worked, was the most important cloth-producing centre in the world. Wool imported from Spain was the most common raw material, but cotton and silk were processed too. At its peak, some 180 different types of fabric were made there -- the last manufacturer closed only in 1977.

Brekelenkam used the same basic composition, a tailor sitting cross-legged in front of the window with two assistants, in his tailor-shop paintings. But each time he slightly changed and rearranged the figures and the details of the interior. For example, in some paintings the tailor is an old man with an elderly wife sitting by the fire. In some, as here, the couple are much younger; in this picture his wife is breastfeeding their child. Typically, only the tailor glances up from his work to engage the eye of the viewer -- as though we are a potential customer, perhaps -- while the others continue to work diligently. Sometimes a small dog is included in the scene, sometimes not.

From the number of different versions, it's clear that Brekelenkam was creating a series of imaginary, or generic, scenarios, but there's no doubt that the basic set up is a standard one. A tailor with a small workshop would have worked with his apprentices in his front room, and would have used a raised platform by the window as a way of maximising the available daylight.

The details of the interiors are also lifelike. The bodkin, scissors and chalk were standard tools, and spare thread hangs in hanks below the shelf. Many Dutch homes of the time had a map hanging -- or in this case, pinned -- above the fireplace. And a still life-painting, a very popular genre of the time, features on the wall of several of Brekelenkam's tailor-shop paintings. This example (of a jug, a glass, a fish and some spring onions or radishes) is similar to the work of the Haarlem artist Pieter Claesz., but Brekelenkam also produced paintings similar to this, so it is possible that it's a copy of one of his own.

This painting is not dated, but several of the tailor-shop scenes are; the earliest is from 1653 (Worcester Art Museum, USA) and the latest, 1664 (private collection). It is impossible to know when the version we see here was made, but it is likely to have been between these two dates.

Style: Baroque
This painting was made by Aelbert Cuyp when he was right at the beginning of his career, probably aged about 20 or 21 -- he was later to become one of the most successful landscape painters of his time. The picture shows his early grasp of how to create a sense of distance and evoke the atmosphere of a cloudy day in the Low Countries.

At the time Cuyp, who was based in Dordrecht, was much influenced by Jan van Goyen, a landscape painter 24 years his senior who worked about 30 miles away in The Hague. If you compare this painting with a contemporary one by van Goyen -- A Windmill by a River, for example -- you can see how Cuyp has followed some of the older artist’s techniques. Both painters used a very restricted palette of greys, browns and greens which helps capture the mood of the prevailing weather. But they avoided too much gloominess by setting the horizon very low on the canvas so that the sky dominates, filling the composition with light and a sense of airiness.

Cuyp was already showing his talent for other subtle light effects. In this painting, the strongest shades are in the foreground: the reflections turn the water almost black, especially on the lower right-hand side and around what appear to be two fishing baskets, or eel traps, floating on the left. By contrast the brightness in the middle of the painting lifts the atmosphere. The thin strip of land beyond seems almost to shimmer between water and sky, while the clouds take the eye upwards.

Human intervention in the landscape is similarly subtle in its effect. The only figures in the painting are given a low profile. The two men in the small boat don’t even break the line of the church roof on the horizon above them. However, the long pole held by the standing figure, together with the angled spas and ropes of the sailing boats and the sticks emerging from the water in the foreground, are much more prominent. They form a series of straight, upright lines which are echoed by the short diagonals of the distant windmill sails. These may be grey and distant but they stand out clearly against the lighter sky.

When compared with later pictures, this early painting allows us to see how much Cuyp’s work changed as he matured. Around this time, several talented Dutch landscape painters who had travelled to Rome -- and experienced the more intense light of Italy -- returned to the Low Countries to work. The Italianate painter who most inspired Cuyp was Jan Both, who came back to Holland in 1641;  Muleteers, and a Herdsman with an Ox and Goats by a Pool, painted in about 1645, shows how Both suffused his landscapes with a much warmer light. It was an effect that Cuyp was soon to adopt and develop as his own career progressed.

Style: Baroque
Paulus Potter worked for barely a decade -- he died when he was 29 -- but he was famous in his lifetime for his scenes of rural life and landscapes populated with domestic animals. In the 1640s and 50s, this was a new genre of Dutch painting and Potter was one of its pioneers. He made his name in 1649 with a monumental life-size painting of a farmer and his bull (now in the Mauritshuis, The Hague).

The smaller scene of rural tranquillity we see here is more typical of the general run of his work. Men and animals work in harmony and there’s a warmth in the air, suggested by the golden light and the long shadows of a summer afternoon. This was a fashionable atmospheric effect, characteristic of Italianate art, which had recently been introduced to Holland by Dutch painters who had visited Rome. The hilly terrain also has an idealised, Italianate feel: it is certainly not the landscape of the dykes and level pastures around Amsterdam and Delft, where Potter was based.

But while the light and landscape may be reminiscent of Italy, these are most definitely Dutch cows. Potter has observed them with great care: look at the way the closest to us closes its eyes while it chews the cud and, just behind, another tenses its body as it urinates. Other details contribute to a sense of peace and plenty: the cows’ udders are full, ready for evening milking, the hay barn is stacked to the rafters and in the field beyond the corn has been cut and gathered into stooks. Meanwhile the animals, sky and landscape -- in harmonious greens, browns and blues -- are all touched by the golden glow of the late afternoon sun.

What was the appeal of such scenes in seventeenth-century Holland? Most of Potter’s customers probably lived in busy, bustling cities and bought such paintings to hang in their town houses, so the peace and quiet of rural scenes may have had a sentimental appeal. But farming and livestock were also vital to the national economy. While the Dutch Republic was a collection of great mercantile cities which traded all over the world, its fortunes were also rooted in the land. Improvements in breeding stock and husbandry had seen a boom in livestock farming, especially cattle, and cheese and butter were not only national staples, but key exports. This painting isn’t just an evocation of rural tranquillity -- it's celebrating a vital source of national wealth and prosperity.

Potter’s influence was a lasting one. He worked in Delft, The Hague and Amsterdam and seems to have directly influenced other landscape artists, including Karel Dujardin, who was active in Haarlem, and the Amsterdam painter Adriaen van de Velde. His etchings and paintings must also have been a formative influence on Aelbert Cuyp, who was to become even more famous for his pastoral landscapes and paintings of cattle -- like A Distant View of Dordrecht, with a Milkmaid and Four Cows, and Other Figures ('The Large Dort').

Style: Baroque
The Virgin Mary, in white, places her hand in Saint Joseph's while the dove of the Holy Ghost hovers above the altar of the Temple in Jerusalem.

This is the Marriage of the Virgin, as told in the Golden Legend, the great medieval collection of saints' lives. According to the legend, the Virgin lived in the Temple in Jerusalem along with other girls sent there to be brought up until the age of 14. When the high priest sent all who had reached the age of womanhood home to be married, Mary declared that she could not go as she had been given to the Temple by her parents and had vowed her virginity to God. On God's instructions, the priest told all the unmarried men of the house of David to bring a branch and lay it on the altar. They did so, and Joseph's branch burst into flower, in fulfilment of the prophecy in Isaiah 11: 10: 'And there shall come forth a rod out of the root of Jesse, and a flower shall rise up out of his root.'

The high priest joins the couple in matrimony, surrounded by a crowd of onlookers. Mary's virginal companions on the right are balanced by her disappointed suitors in exotic headgear on the left. In the front left a young woman holding a toddler looks on, though he is more interested in the small dog which has joined the ceremony.  In the background, on the steps of the altar, other figures gaze up and gesture in astonishment at the dove.

This jewel-like painting on copper is characteristic of the early works of Ludovico Carracci. His skill as a painter is evident in the variety of effects he achieved in this small picture: the glowing colours emerging from the dimness of the Temple; the delicate touch in parts of the painting, apparent in the details of the vestments, the flowering rod and the hairs of the dog, and the way in which they contrast with the rich, heavy drapery of Mary and Joseph; the fragile charm and innocence of the faces of Virgin and her companions.

For such a small painting, the composition is surprisingly complex with a strong geometrical structure to draw our eye around the picture. The mother and child in the front form a broad-based triangle; another triangular group is made up of the heads and shoulders of Joseph and Mary and the priest. Diagonal lines run up the back and shoulders of the mother and through the leg and foot of the man on the steps, guiding our eye to the flowering rod, and through the hats and heads of the suitors up to the dove. These contrast with the strong verticals of the columns of the Temple and of the main figures and their attendants.

This picture may well have been made for the Bolognese collector and patron Alessandro Tanari. Tanari owned no fewer than 13 pictures by Carracci and commissioned  a painting on copper of the Marriage of the Virgin  to commemorate his marriage to Diana Barbieri on 13 January 1589. It was apparently placed in an elaborate silver frame and hung in his wife's bedroom.

Style: Baroque, Academic
A quiet sea under a vast sky. In spite of the calm, there's a light wind. Grey clouds billow, with enough breaks to cast a luminous light on the water. Two slender poles in midstream mark the safe course up the river at low water, their reflections long because of the angle of the sun.

The sails of a small boat fill as it heads out from harbour. At the peak flies a red and white flag, echoed by the matching flag on the incoming boat slipping home with the tide. They may be two ferries from the same town passing each other, the flags identifying them as from the port of Dordrecht, south of Amsterdam.

Flags were of great importance in the Dutch Republic -- they celebrated the new identity of an increasingly prosperous nation -- and none more so than the red, white and blue flag of the Republic. We see it on the wijdschip, the larger boat anchored in the shadows. On board people wait patiently, their silhouettes dwarfed by the tall sail. A smaller boat brings passengers ashore. They and their clothes are visible enough to make out characters –- merchants wear wide-brimmed hats or white collars, while others wear heavy workaday coats. One figure looks out expectantly to the shore; one stands as if in charge, taking fares perhaps. Others are hunched in conversation.

Elsewhere, a barefoot man -- perhaps a fisherman, perhaps a beachcomber -- trudges along the wet shingle heaving a basket on his back. Another man, on the right, stands in his boat, hands in pockets, his gaze on us. In the distance is a building with a stunted but sturdy spire, probably a round tower, part of the city's fortifications that can still be seen in Amsterdam today.

The new-found wealth of the Republic came over the sea, largely from the East and West Indies, brought in on the great merchant ships featured in paintings by Willem van der Velde and Ludolf Bakhuizen. But van de Cappelle usually confined himself to the vaulted skies, flat landscape and domestic shipping of the Netherlands that he shows in this picture. Using the cool colours and limited palette of his early career he captures the pearly light and reflections of the estuary in a composition that’s harmonious, but with its stillness and dark clouds is at the same time brooding and atmospheric. Later in his short career he adopted mellower colours, giving a warmer, often busier sensation to his paintings.

Van de Cappelle was a wealthy merchant in the city of Amsterdam and a self-taught artist who painted only part time -- he is sometimes described as ‘a Sunday painter’. He specialised in the marine paintings so much in demand in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. Perhaps because of his own life in commerce, he understood the taste of his audience for these pictures, which often feature as a picture within a picture on the walls in Dutch interiors and genre paintings.

Style: Baroque
A bright yellow sun rises in the centre of the picture, beside a tree. Its vibrant colour stands out against the rest of the composition, which is darker in tone than its companion piece, Sunset.

Cezanne and Van Gogh were both admirers of Monticelli's use of thickly applied paint or impasto, and the directional brushstrokes in his later work. This painting, which is typical of the artist's late style, appears to have been painted outdoors. Cezanne and Monticelli were very good friends during the 1880s, and they often used to go off together to paint in the open air. It was perhaps during one of these outdoor sessions that Monticelli painted Sunrise, which is usually dated to about 1882–4.

Style: Impressionist
This is an early, small-scale copy of one of the world’s most famous paintings, Rembrandt's The Night Watch, a monumental work of 1642 which now hangs in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Rembrandt’s commission was to paint a huge group portrait of musketeers under the command of Captain Frans Banning Cocq, a lawyer who had inherited a fortune from his father-in-law. A few years after the painting was finished, Cocq was to become Mayor of Amsterdam. At the time, companies of volunteers like these, known as militia groups, were an important part of the defence arrangements for Dutch cities. Membership and leadership positions were held in high social esteem and many expensive portraits were made of different groups.

Rembrandt received the huge sum of 1,600 guilders for his original painting, which shows Banning Cocq, wearing a red sash in the foreground, directing his lieutenant, Willem van Ruytenburch, resplendent in yellow, to order the company to march out. Behind them the company's colours are carried by the ensign, Jan Visscher Cornelissen. A dozen or so other members of the militia strike various poses: cleaning, loading and apparently even firing their muskets. Look at the figure in the helmet immediately behind Banning Cocq -- he appears to have discharged his gun as another musketeer deflects the angle of the barrel. Quite what is happening here is one of the famous mysteries of the painting.

The sitters paid an average of 100 guilders each for their portraits, the sum varying with the degree of prominence in the painting. After it was finished, the work was hung in the Kloveniersdoelen (great room) of the Amsterdam musketeers’ meeting place, together with portraits of militia groups by other painters. It remained there until 1715, when it was removed to the town hall. This copy closely follows the original, and was probably commissioned by Banning Cocq himself. The picture was owned by relatives of his and a watercolour copy that the captain had made for his family album (on loan to the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) was based on this copy rather than Rembrandt's painting.

It is far smaller than the original --  about 0.5 square metres compared with nearly 16 square metres. But it is a vital historical document, as it records details of the original which were lost when it was cut down on all sides when it was moved to the town hall. The two men and a child behind a parapet on the extreme left in the copy no longer appear in The Night Watch, and the copy also shows more of the drummer on the right. An elaborately framed cartouche (shield) inscribed with militiamen’s names which hangs on the right side of the arch in The Night Watch is not seen in the copy; it was almost certainly added to the original painting long after it was finished.

Style: Baroque
La Fargue presents a flourishing market packed with people. Such a picture was painted to provide entertainment in discovering every transaction, every misdeed, every joke -- even introducing the new fashions in dress for the wealthy.

A member of a large family, La Fargue lived in The Hague and knew it well, and the city when it was busy and crowded became one his favourite themes. He looks on his world fondly and with humour, making 'slice of life' pictures similar to William Hogarth, but without Hogarth's merciless, satirical eye.

Seen from the Prinsengracht -- one of the principal thoroughfares of The Hague  -- the building in the centre is the Grote Kerk, the Church of St Jacob. On the left is the Boterhuis, a newly-built warehouse for storing wholesale butter -- one of the mainstays of the prosperous Dutch economy. In front of it, a market stall sells second hand clothes, with stockings hanging up and looking as if the legs are still in them. A second stall offers old curtains, blankets and bedclothes. A black metal fountain provides water and a horse and cart stand ready to take away unsold goods.

La Fargue has painted the picture on a mahogany panel, an expensive wood brought in from the West Indies on a Dutch trading ship that brought other luxury goods to a self-confident, prosperous country. He paints the tall trees with the impasto technique, so the surface of each leaf would be rough if you were to touch it, compared with the smooth but vigorous brushstrokes of the rest of the picture. He paints every brick, every windowpane and every crooked drainpipe with care and precision. He does the same with the ramshackle market buildings and with the people, giving them character and life.

Over to the right are people at ease: wine is drunk, spirits sipped, clay pipes smoked. Behind them, a woman bends over a basket. Next to her, a young woman has her hand on the arm of a shy, awkward young man. Judging by the vegetables on show, it was a good year for carrots. A mother leans down to taste one while her little girl tugs her apron. The child wants to go and look at the great lady in the gorgeous white dress, who, with other people round her, has her attention on something unseen on the ground.

A man in a smart blue frock coat addresses a young woman. A dog jumps up to be petted, another sniffs for food.  Beneath a nearby tree, another fine young man is about to have his pocket picked. A woman's hand sneaks towards it while a second woman catches his attention. Behind it three women, arms clasped across their stomachs as if nervous, stand in front of an old woman, who is perhaps telling their fortune, perhaps hiring a maid, perhaps dispensing rough justice.

The fun of the picture, then and now, is in a personal interpretation of each little event, and in returning again and again to find something new to explore.

Style: Neoclassical
This is thought to be one of Boccaccino's earliest known works, painted shortly after he arrived in Cremona from Ferrara in 1500. The style of armour and dress also suggest a date not long after 1500. The altarpiece was painted for the right-hand side of a choir screen erected between 1499 and 1505 in the church of S. Domenico, one of the largest churches in Cremona. The lighting in the painting comes from the right, which would have been the direction of light in the church. Boccaccino also painted an altarpiece of the Virgin for the left side of the choir screen.

Christ carries the Cross escorted by three helmeted soldiers, two of whom are pulling the rope around his neck. Two Jewish officials follow on horseback behind Christ and a Roman soldier in armour rides ahead. The procession winds up the hill, on top of which two crosses have been erected. The two thieves who will be crucified beside Jesus walk ahead, wearing only loincloths. Saint John clasps his hands and looks down at the Virgin who has fainted and is surrounded by the three kneeling Marys.

Saint John's position in the centre of the altarpiece suggests he was the subject of special devotion by the person who commissioned it. The altarpiece's chief subject is the swooning (lo spasimo in Italian) of the Virgin, an episode shown in a number of sixteenth-century Italian paintings of Christ carrying the Cross. The prominent positions of the young man with the sword and the mounted soldier in armour suggest that they might have been donors, although it is more usual for donors to watch the religious event rather than take part. It has also been suggested that the young soldier might be a portrait of the painter's eldest son, Camillo. The Procession to Calvary is not a common subject for the main panel of an Italian altarpiece, although it is often included in the smaller panels beneath, known as predellas. Another Italian example of a similar date is Ridolfo Ghirlandaio's Procession to Calvary of about 1505.

Boccaccino's composition is unusually ambitious in its complexity and variety of action. Some parts are very carefully considered and painted, for example the reflections of the knight's hands in his armour, whereas other features seem to have been adopted for convenience, for example the 'flaps' of landscape concealing the figures' legs in the procession, and the repetition of the hand gestures of several figures. The picture appears to have been painted quickly. Long sweeping brushstrokes can be seen in the sky, and the hills are modelled in thick paint, with the buildings painted wet-in-wet. Highlights are applied meticulously in some areas, for example in Saint John's hair, and with great energy in others, such as the splashes of paint on the arm of the soldier pushing Christ, and on his helmet. The background was filled in with careless speed and the paint on the flank of the white horse has been worked with the fingers.

Style: High Renaissance