wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
A richly dressed lady gazes out at us from this painting. We don't know who she is but the jewellery and fabrics she wears could only have been afforded by the exceptionally wealthy -- the extravagance of her dress is comparable with that worn by a princess (look at A Young Princess (Dorothea of Denmark?), for example). Her clothes are rather like those worn by Elisabeth of Austria, Queen of France (1554--1592), in a portrait by François Clouet now in the Louvre, Paris.

The woman's black cap is ornamented with pearls and jewels, and a long black veil hangs from it. Her collar, belt and bracelets are decorated in the same way and make up what was known as a parure or set. The jewelled trelliswork across the yoke of her dress is made of pearls in golden settings held together with golden and grey -- presumably silver -- ties. Her dress is pale purple, with yellow and white patterns suggesting embroidery in gold and silver threads. Her lower sleeves are white with golden-yellow stripes. The puffs at her shoulders appear to be slashed and are covered in semi-transparent gauze; golden brooches pin the gauze to the puffs. Two strings of beads hang from her hands: they are probably two ends of the same string.

She was perhaps unmarried: she faces right, and if this portrait was part of a pair of a married couple the lady would usually have been on our right, facing left. Her clothes are French in style, but the transparent oversleeves seem to have been fashionable in England in the 1560s and 1570s. The composition follows Netherlandish, Spanish and English rather than French conventions: the figure is cut just below the crotch, whereas French artists usually cut their figures at or slightly above the waist and did not include the hands. It's possible that she was not French but had adopted French fashions in dress, retaining her gauze English(?) oversleeves, and had asked the artist to follow foreign compositional conventions.

The painting resembles in many ways a much larger picture by François Quesnel dated 1572 and said to be of Mary Anne Waltham, but more likely to be a portrait of a French lady (now in the collection of Earl Spencer, Althorp House). Both women look at the viewer. Their eyes are enlarged and widely spaced, the corners of their mouths curl up into slight smiles, and their waists are remarkably slender. Their hands are poorly drawn and insensitively modelled, with crudely outlined fingernails. Quesnel seems to have realised he was not good at drawing hands and omitted them wherever possible, as in Portrait of a Young Woman.

Style: High Renaissance
The Christ Child stands on a stone parapet leaning against his mother, who turns to meet his gaze. He wraps one arm tenderly about her neck as she supports him gently around his waist in a very natural pose. In his other hand he holds an apple, a symbol of the Fall of humankind that he will redeem by his future Passion. The little green book held by the Virgin is probably the Old Testament of the Bible, which foretells Christ’s future sacrifice -- she is marking her page with her thumb. The young Virgin’s foreknowledge of Christ’s destiny adds deep poignancy to the look exchanged between mother and son.

The painting has sometimes been accepted as an original work by Luini, but it was probably made by his workshop or may even be an early copy.

Style: High Renaissance
Christ turns to look at us as he carries the Cross on which he will be crucified. This type of painting, in which the viewer is put in the position of the holy women on whom Christ looked on the route to Calvary, was especially popular in North Italy in the sixteenth century. For another example in the National Gallery’s collection, see Christ carrying the Cross by Altobello Melone.

Christ's eyes appeal to us in his pain and suffering to stir our emotions and arouse our compassion. The tight focus on Christ increases the drama and emotion of the moment. The dark background adds to this effect -- there is nothing to distract the viewer's gaze or devotion. This type of pose, looking back at the viewer over the shoulder, was popular in contemporary portraiture, and can be seen in Andrea del Sarto's Portrait of a Young Man. It is used to suggest a momentary connection between the sitter and viewer and to create a strong sense of psychological intimacy. The pose is used here to humanise Christ and to create a sense of deep personal connection with him.

Giampietrino painted small-scale, half-length pictures of biblical scenes, frequently in multiple versions, and Christ carrying the Cross is a typical example. The composition reflects the work of Leonardo, who was particularly interested in the study and depiction of emotion through facial expression. Christ carrying the Cross is based on a silver-point study of the same subject by Leonardo, which is now in the Accademia, Venice. The silver-point study and other preparatory drawings may have been for a lost painting by Leonardo, or perhaps for a painting by one of his assistants. Giampietrino’s picture is one of many based on this drawing by a range of artists working in Lombardy at the time. Many Milanese painters, including Boltraffio, Bramantino and Luini, adopted Leonardo’s style, incorporating his motifs and emulating his smoky painterly effects. The composition of Giampietrino’s Salome is also derived from a picture by Leonardo.

The National Gallery’s panel is one of several more or less identical versions of the same picture by Giampietrino, suggesting that he kept reusing the same cartoon. Charcoal would have been rubbed through holes in the pricked cartoon to trace the outlines on the panel ready for painting. Infrared reflectography clearly shows the traces of the cartoon transfer onto the panel.

Style: High Renaissance
A single mop-headed rose is caught in an intense beam of clear light, which also glitters down the graceful sweep of the handle of the slender jug placed opposite. Fantin-Latour has left the rest of the picture in semi-darkness, making it difficult to see which of the fruit in the pewter dish are plums and which are apples. They nestle in a bed of leaves in an array of soft, deep colours from purple to mossy green; the bright red of the large apple serves to brighten the picture. The elegance of the jug is contrasted with the plain glass tumbler into which the flowers have been unceremoniously pushed. They stand on a mahogany table that still glows richly in what little general light remains, perhaps from a dying fire.

We are left wondering how the rose can be so brightly lit without casting a shadow on the wall behind. Later in his career, Fantin-Latour continued to use a bare wall as a background for his bouquets, but they were often lighter and brighter, as we can see in A Basket of Roses, also in the National Gallery's collection.

In composition, the painting recalls the works of François Bonvin, Fantin-Latour’s contemporary, who was inspired by Dutch still-life painting of the seventeenth century. But in its stillness and feeling of transience -- the translucence of the glass, the single blossom about to lose its petals -- the painting seems to owe something to the eighteenth-century French still-life artist Chardin. In his painting House of Cards, a precarious construction of cards acts as a symbol of the brevity of life, and there is a hint of this thought in Fantin-Latour’s painting. In spite of the costly jug and flowers, it has a melancholy air -- as if a door has shut and left the house empty except for the memory of the few things on the table.

The delicate little picture was painted while Fantin-Latour was working in Courbet’s studio in Paris. He found Courbet ‘charming’, but picked up little of the older artist’s robust style (compare this picture to Courbet’s Still Life with Apples and a Pomegranate, painted ten years after Fantin-Latour’s picture). Nor does the painting have the confident technique that Fantin-Latour showed later in his career, in paintings such as The Rosy Wealth of June. But we see the seeds sown of his sensitive portrayal of flowers, which won him success as the most sought after decorative artist of his time.

Style: Realist
This picture was once part of a multi-panelled altarpiece with four tiers, made for the Florentine church of Santa Croce. It would have appeared in the third tier, above an image of the apostle Paul (now in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin) and beneath an image of David.

This panel was originally on the left-hand side of the altarpiece: both saints look to their left, towards a central image of the Virgin and Child below. The third layer of the altarpiece sat just above the main tier, and consisted of six identically shaped panels each depicting two different apostles. Saints Peter and Paul were excluded, as they appeared in the position of honour on either side of the Virgin Mary. They were replaced by two female saints, Saint Elizabeth of Hungary and Saint Clare, who both belonged to the Franciscan Order. We have one more panel from this layer, showing Saints Thaddeus and Simon.

The inscriptions that identify these figures as Saints Bartholomew and Andrew are very damaged. The two have very different features: Saint Bartholomew is shown as a young man with thick red hair and a beard, while Saint Andrew is shown as an older man with grey hair. Saint Bartholomew's tunic is painted with an elaborate pattern, and brown leaf-like shapes are probably mordant (the sticky substance used to attach gold leaf to a panel). This means that these areas were originally gilded. The edges of both draperies were also most likely gilded.

The band of decorative shapes, called quatrefoils, that runs beneath the panel is a modern imitation of those found on the other panels in this row.

Style: Gothic, Early Renaissance
Saint Catherine sits reading a book  on the left, beside the broken spiked wheel on which she was tortured during her martyrdom. The Virgin Mary's elderly cousin Saint Elizabeth sits on the right holding her son, the infant John the Baptist. He wears his traditional camel skin and holds a scroll that reads 'Ecce Agnus Dei' ('Behold the Lamb of God'), signifying Christ’s future sacrifice for humankind. The Christ Child turns on his mother’s lap to look at Saint Catherine, who gazes out of the picture at us. There are some traces of scribbled writing on the pier behind Saint Catherine but it is not clear what, if anything, they mean.

The poor quality of the painting suggests that Bonifazio was not personally involved in making the picture; it may have been put together by a follower from a combination of motifs from Bonifazio’s work. The costumes can be dated to the early 1530s.

Style: High Renaissance
Saint John the Baptist is depicted here as though sitting for a portrait. He is shown bust length, set back from the viewer behind a stone parapet, as was common in early sixteenth-century Venetian portraits. This choice of format makes the saint present to the viewer as though he were a contemporary.

Saint John's simple cross is formed from a split stick, with another shorter stick placed horizontally in the cleft. The words on the scroll, 'Behold the Lamb of God', are taken from the Gospel of John (John 1: 29 and 26). They refer to Christ who, like a lamb, will be sacrificed for the salvation of mankind.

This painting was previously believed to be by Bartolomeo Montagna, but is probably a late work by Buonconsiglio, who trained with him in Vicenza. It appears to have been painted as an independent picture, rather than having been part of a larger work, and was probably intended for private devotion.

Giovanni Buonconsiglio, called il Marescalco (meaning ‘the Equerry’), worked in Vicenza and Venice and seems to have had contact with Giovanni Bellini and Antonello da Messina. This painting follows a characteristic portrait format associated with Bellini, inspired by Netherlandish examples and by the work of Antonello da Messina, with a sculptural-style bust-length head and shoulders behind a parapet. Bellini's Portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan also follows a similar format. Bellini frequently set his sitter’s heads against deep blue skies dotted with white clouds.

The picture is obscured by a dirty varnish that has darkened, making it difficult to get a sense of the colours intended by the artist. However we can still appreciate the subtle lighting effects and striking realism of the face, set against the blue sky with pink-tinged clouds on the horizon. The artist has captured in minute detail Saint John’s red-rimmed moist eyes, and the varying textures of the strands of his hair and his camel-skin robe, painting the highlights on individual bristles of his moustache and the fine blond hairs in his beard. The saint in this imagined portrait must have originally appeared remarkably vivid and present.

Style: High Renaissance
This panel was most probably the right-hand wing of a diptych (a painting made up of two panels), and was probably made in Cologne in the 1530s. The location of the left-hand panel is unknown, but it most probably showed the dead Christ.

The figures huddle together and look in the direction of the left panel, weeping at the sight. Their grief is dramatic -- their faces anguished, their tears like glass beads on their cheeks. The rippling folds of their brightly coloured clothing intensify the emotion.

The woman at the front is the Virgin Mary, wearing her traditional blue mantle, which here has fur lining at the cuffs. The woman to her left is Mary Magdalene, identifiable by her long, loose hair. Like the holy woman wearing the cap behind her, Mary Magdalene is dressed in elaborate clothing more contemporary to the picture -- her billowing sleeve is patterned with silk brocade. The man is Saint John the Evangelist, who is known as the 'beloved disciple' and to whom Christ, at the Crucifixion, entrusted his mother.

Style: High Renaissance
Born in Honfleur, Boudin -- the son of a ship's captain -- was constantly fascinated by the life of Normandy ports. He spent each summer from 1864 on the coast, in Trouville and its sister town Deauville, which sit either side of the river Touques. In 1884 he built a house in Deauville, where he lived for the summer months during the last 14 years of his life.

Boudin painted the port of Deauville throughout his career, recording it as it developed and grew busier with trade, fishing boats and the yachts of wealthy visitors. He painted such scenes as this partly to satisfy the demands of dealers but also because he wanted to capture the movement of water and clouds, the transient gleam of light playing on waves and the characteristic motion of ships.

What attracted Boudin was not necessarily the bustling life of the quaysides, but scenes of vessels entering or leaving ports in relatively calm conditions. Here magnificent sailing ships, their tall masts punctuating the cloud-filled sky, sit in the harbour, their hulls reflected in the still waters. The scene is curiously devoid of people: the only hint of a human presence is the hastily sketched in suggestion of two figures in a boat beside the central sailing ship.

In 1883 the critic Gustave Geoffroy noted that Boudin was in love with the sea, adding that 'he knows all the inlets, all the ports, all the river mouths... He records alluvial formations, the pools of water left far inland by high tides; he also records docks cluttered with high-sided vessels. He is full of the poetry of the sea and he is wholly familiar with the techniques of navigation.'

Style: Impressionist
Trained as a goldsmith, Barye was primarily a sculptor, particularly of animal bronzes, who was hailed as ‘the Michelangelo of the menagerie’ by the writer and critic Théophile Gautier. In 1841, when in his mid-forties, he began painting landscapes in oil, and by the end of the decade he was regularly visiting the forest of Fontainebleau. This was a popular location for artists in the mid-nineteenth century, especially the area in and around the village of Barbizon.  At Fontainebleau he painted alongside members of the Barbizon group of landscape painters including Millet and Diaz. Barye never exhibited his oil paintings, which only became known to the public at a posthumous exhibition of his work in 1875 and at a sale in 1876 (which included 99 oil paintings).

Barye’s oils are characterised by dark colours and thick impasto paint to build up form and structure, his technique influenced by other Barbizon artists, especially Rousseau and Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps (for whom Corot was to paint The Four Times of Day). But he also worked in watercolour, a medium in which he excelled, producing pictures of African and Asian animals such as lions, tigers and elephants. Unlike his oils, he did exhibit and sell his animal watercolours, which received critical acclaim. In his review of an exhibition in 1860 that included Barye’s watercolours, Gautier noted, ‘No one has mastered the wild animal like Barye. Was he a gladiator in some Roman circus? … With respect to tigers, only Delacroix and Méry are in Barye’s class.’

Painted in the 1850s or 1860s, this small picture most likely shows a gorge in the forest at Fontainebleau. We are looking up a gently sloping rocky hillside, which is dotted with trees (including a prominent silver birch in the right middle ground), rounded mossy rocks and larger, more irregular boulders. Barye was particularly drawn to the more remote and desolate sites in and around the forest such as the rocky gorges at Franchard and at Apremont (which he painted for a picture now in the Louvre). A solitary bird flies across the relatively small area of blue sky. Despite this patch of sky, the scene feels dark and claustrophobic -- Gautier, for example, noted that even in Barye's watercolours, ‘the landscape backgrounds lack air.’ Apart from occasional deer, Barye’s oil landscapes do not usually include people or animals, but instead evoke an almost primordial terrain. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the rocky landscapes of Fontainebleau appear in many of his animal pictures. An 1889 catalogue of his work observed that, ‘without straying far from Paris, he conceived many of his numerous watercolours … combining data borrowed from nature with his inner visions, he created little landscape settings of a strange and truly exotic character in which ferocious beasts seem to be at home.’

Style: Barbizon
Paintings of Saint Jerome were probably more common than those of any other saint in homes in Venice in the early sixteenth century. This painting is unusual in relation to earlier examples in that it is painted on canvas rather than panel and it is unusually large – of a size that would suit the side wall of a chapel, or a grand home.

Saint Jerome kneels against a rocky ledge in the wilderness contemplating the crucified Christ. The glowing horizon below the ultramarine sky and the dark city in the distance suggests it is dawn or dusk. Savoldo was particularly admired for his depictions of these times of day and the dramatic lighting effects they produced. An open book, perhaps Jerome's Bible, is propped below the Crucifix while another volume rests beneath his knees. The painting is signed on the rock below the open book: 'Giovanni Girolamo of Brescia, of the Savoldo family, made this.'

Saint Jerome's arm with the rock in his hand appears to swing out of the painting towards us. His pose is dynamic, his body muscular and monumental as he prepares to beat the stone against his chest in penitence. His other hand seems to grasp the air in anticipation of the pain, his arm boldly foreshortened. His unkempt beard and strands of tangled hair stand out against the sky, while in the distance a large church towers over a city. It may be SS. Giovanni e Paolo in Venice, near where Savoldo was living in 1532. The waters of the distant lagoon, painted with the blue pigment azurite, have probably darkened.

The foreshortening of Jerome's hand and his bearded head are similar to details in Savoldo's Pesaro Altarpiece (Brera, Milan) of about 1525, as is the landscape with its coastline fringed with buildings and boats. The half-open apprehensive gesture of Jerome's left hand and his furrowed brow are also found in other paintings by Savoldo of the later 1520s.

On 28 November 1527 Giovan Paolo Averoldi of Brescia recorded a payment in his personal account book of a 'scudo doro' (a gold scudo) to Savoldo 'towards the cost of making a Saint Jerome.' The payment was made in Venice at the artist's house and was witnessed by his household. The commission may have been for the National Gallery's picture, which seems bolder and more monumental than those Savoldo painted in the early 1520s. Savoldo's second name was Jerome, or 'Girolamo' in Italian, and it is likely he also painted himself as Saint Jerome, and that there is another painting of this subject.

It was recorded in 1648 that the wife of the French Ambassador in Venice had a Saint Jerome praying in the desert as well as a Mary Magdalene by Savoldo. These may have been the National Gallery's Saint Jerome and Mary Magdalene. There is a preparatory drawing in black chalk on faded blue paper in the Louvre of the head of Saint Jerome, which is very close to the National Gallery's painted version.

Style: High Renaissance
Adriaen Coorte is one of those unusual artists whose work was forgotten after his death and then rediscovered centuries later. This is a typical example of the small, exquisitely executed still-life paintings in which he specialised, and which only started to be appreciated again in the early twentieth century. The National Gallery owns just this example and acquired it only recently, in 2015.

The formula Coorte followed most often -- as here -- was to depict fruit, nuts, vegetables or shells set on the edge of a stone shelf. He used a dark background and dramatic lighting to create strong highlights and deep shadows, an effect which emphasises the contrast between the smooth finish and sharp edges of the stone and the softer curves of his subject. He was highly skilled at rendering the textures of natural surfaces, like the translucence of ripe gooseberries, the tiny pocks in the skins of the strawberries and the musty sheen on the plum. The curled, bug-nibbled edges of the leaves are also depicted with painstaking delicacy.

This high degree of precision gives the impression of a realistic scene -- you might assume it has been painted from life. But this can’t have been the case, because the food depicted would not have been available at the same time. Asparagus spears are cut in May; strawberries (these are small wild ones) can ripen as early as May, but June is much more likely; gooseberries are picked from early July; and it's very unlikely that you would have found a ripe plum in seventeenth-century Holland before August.

Compositions which belied seasonal availability in this way were common in Dutch still-life and flower paintings, however. There was a long tradition of artists working from studio drawings and oil studies, and they were adept at reusing the same references. Indeed Coorte painted what seems to be the same bunch of asparagus several times -- there is a version in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, for example -- and the bowl of strawberries appears in at least two other pictures.

This particular combination is unique in Coorte’s work. There may be no significance in his choice other than the aesthetic appeal of the different textures, and the strong, clear red and green colour contrasts. But a neat sequence does emerge from his selection: asparagus spears shoot directly from the earth, strawberries grow a few centimetres above it, gooseberry bushes mature at about one metre high and plums hang highest of all. Perhaps in his highly controlled, pared down way, Coorte was hinting at the rich variety which emerged from the market gardens and orchards of the Netherlands from soil to tree between May and August each year.

Style: Baroque