wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
Pieter Jacobsz. Codde was an Amsterdam-based painter who specialised in small-scale genre paintings, although he also painted portraits and religious works. The majority of his pictures are interior scenes showing pastimes familiar to his middle-class buyers – games of backgammon, music making or 'merry company' pictures of friends gathered in taverns. Codde’s pictures are characterised by both their skill and their distinctive brown-grey palette.

Codde is said to have studied with Frans Hals, but despite the fact that in 1637 he completed a large work left unfinished by Hals of a company of the civic guard – a work known as The Meagre Company (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) – it is more likely that he trained with either Barent van Someren (1572--1632) or Cornelis van der Voort (1576--1624). Portrait of a Man, a Woman and a Boy in a Room nevertheless shows something of Hals’s skill at painting multiple figures.

The picture is a triple portrait of 1640 of the sort of bourgeois sitters who were Codde's clients. The members of the family, possibly Hendricus Meursius and Judith Cotermans with their son, have dressed with care and are grouped in front of an unlit fire: their clothes, the hangings of the bed that can be seen in the next room, the painting above the fireplace and the carpet that covers the table all indicate that this is a well-to-do household.

Faced with this unremarkable group, Codde’s challenge was to give life and interest to a static scene. He did this by making the viewer a player in the action. The family look at the viewer as at someone who has just walked into their room: the father gestures towards them with his hand, his leaning, legs-akimbo pose one of unusual informality but indicating clearly that he is master of the house. His son has doffed his hat to the newcomer while his wife has just risen from her chair and still holds the skirt of her gown in her hand. Their faces all wear expressions of respectful welcome.

This family harmony and decorousness contrasts with what little is known of Codde’s own domestic life. It is recorded that at a summer party in 1625 he became embroiled in a fight with his friend and possible pupil Willem Duyster and hit him in the face with a 'tin pitcher'. In 1636 Codde and his wife divorced – not an easy process in the seventeenth century – when he was accused of raping their maid. Nothing could be proved, however, and he was locked up for just one night. Such scandals did not seem to put off would-be patrons, and in 1657 he could afford to buy a handsome house on one of Amsterdam’s finer canals. He was also the owner, according to an inventory, of an extensive picture collection.

Style: Baroque
We can sense the confidence and energy of the man in this portrait. He is positioned slightly higher than the viewer, so we have to look up at him; he returns our gaze with a direct, rather aloof look in his eyes.

His pose seems to reflect his vitality and a sense of self-belief: there is a sureness and dynamism in the casual lean of his body, the turn of his head, his exposed forearm and the strong angles created by the bend of his elbows. This man doesn't bother with fussy sartorial details -- an untied ribbon dangles from one of his cuffs. The pose also gives the painting a strong visual structure based on two opposing diagonals. One is formed by the parallel lines of his forearms, the other by the line of his head and torso.

The sitter has been identified as Lucas Fayd'herbe (1617--1697). He was a successful sculptor and architect who lived and worked in Mechelen and was probably one of Rubens’s last pupils. There is no documentary proof for this identification, but the sitter bears a very strong resemblance to an engraved portrait of Fayd’herbe by Gonzales Coques. It was published in 1661 in Het Gulden Cabinet, a book by Cornelis de Bie which contained portraits and biographies of 'the Most Famous Painters, Architects, Sculptors and Engravers of This Century'. Our painting was probably made in the 1640s, a date indicated by the costume, and it shows a somewhat younger man. But the line of the nose, the shape of the lips and chin and the hairline are consistent in both our painting and the Het Gulden Cabinet print. There is another portrait of Fayd’herbe by Coques in the National Gallery's collection, which also shows him at a later age, probably in his forties.

There is no signature on the picture, so we can’t be sure who made it. The strongest candidate is Pieter Franchoijs, a successful portrait and figure painter who was a cousin of Fayd’herbe. He had also been a pupil of Rubens and he too lived and worked in Mechelen.

Style: Baroque
Donck, whose signature is below the stump in the foreground, left almost no trace in the historical records. We don't even know his first name, only that he signed several small genre and portrait paintings between 1627 and 1640 and that he may have worked in Amsterdam.

The sitters in this portrait were named in 1891, a year after the National Gallery bought it, but the evidence for this identification is lost. If it is van Hensbeeck and Koeck we know little about them, except that van Hensbeeck bought two houses in Utrecht in 1648. There's a deathbed portrait of Koeck Claesdr dated 1679 by Christiaan Jansz. Dusart.

We can say for sure that husband, wife and child all wear expensive fabrics and that the husband appears to be gesturing proprietorially to his estates. The basket of grapes may be a biblical reference to the women's fertility: 'Thy wife shall be as a fruitful vine…' (Psalm 128: 3). The cathedral in the far distance maybe the Dom of Utrecht before the nave collapsed in 1674.

Style: Baroque
The wind seems to chase the clouds across this painting, letting through a fitful sun to light up the tumbling water for one moment. In another it will be gone, falling instead on the sheep on the steep hillside across the valley, perhaps, or the distant windmill and church steeple beyond. The man on the bridge of the sluice is about to close the gate to stop the water pouring through. He seems to pause, perhaps to summon his strength, perhaps just pondering the flickering light on the rushing torrent.

The mill house is old and semi-derelict, its thatch bolstered up with bundles of reeds. The sound of water would be unceasing in this place: sometimes the waterfall, or a gentle stream when the gates were shut; sometimes rain or, when that stops, perhaps just the sound of water dripping through the roof.

In the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, there is a van Ruisdael painting entitled A Thatch Roofed House with a Watermill. It's thought to show the same mill seen from the back, but in warmer colours than the cool blues and grey-greens of this painting. In 1826, after seeing the Rotterdam picture, the British landscape painter John Constable wrote to his friend J. C. Fisher: 'I have seen an affecting picture by Ruisdael. It haunts my mind and clings to my heart -- a man and a boy are cutting reeds in a running stream (in the tail-run) -- the water so true clear and fresh -- as brisk as champagne.'

It's thought that the water mill shown belonged to the manor house of Singrave near Denekamp, a small village close to the German border, but another at nearby Haaksbergen has also been suggested as the model for the picture. Whichever is correct -- if either of them is, bearing in mind that many Dutch pictures of the time were given titles long after their making -- the setting of the mill is entirely van Ruisdael's invention. There are no hills of the height he shows anywhere in Overijssel, the Dutch district where both villages are to be found. Van Ruisdael travelled quite widely, making sketches and drawings that he used imaginatively in his landscapes. He also used the drawings of Allart van Everdingen, who had been to Scandinavia and returned with mountainous views quite new and exciting in their rough grandeur. It's unlikely that any of van Ruisdael's more dramatic pictures are taken exactly from life, but were given a romanticised atmosphere that appealed to collectors living in the flat Dutch landscape.

Style: Baroque
Leonardo da Vinci is one of the most emulated and copied painters in history, and many have tried to reproduce his painting style. Several artists whose works are part of our collection -- Boltraffio and Marco d'Oggiono for example -- trained in his workshop in the 1490s, and were part of the so-called 'first-generation' of Leonardeschi (the term for followers of Leonardo). Some, even those who didn't train with Leonardo but did imitate his style, are identifiable because of consistency in the manner in which they followed him; many, like the artist of this picture, are not.

Paintings like this fulfilled a demand for pictures in Leonardo's style, especially in Milan after his departure in 1513, which is around the time this work was made. The multiple supple folds of the draperies, the muted colours and the generally dark atmosphere from which the figures seem to emerge are the artist's homage to Leonardo's works of the early years of the sixteenth century. The composition, however, is most closely based upon a picture made by Leonardo in the early 1490s, The Madonna Litta (State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg). It shows the Virgin feeding the infant Christ, his little legs wriggling as he grasps her breast in his mouth. In both images, the Virgin looks down towards her child while he gazes out at the viewer, a design also used by Boltraffio in The Virgin and Child.

In the Madonna Litta and Boltraffio's painting, the Virgin's head is placed against a dark background -- a wall and a green fabric banner respectively -- with views towards a vast landscape on either side. This painter copies the design, placing a large tree trunk behind the Virgin's head which is crowned by its foliage, and including views of a dramatic landscape on either side. To the right a walled town is precariously positioned on the slope of a hill in front of an improbably tall and ominous rock formation. The device of showing holy figures within a disconcertingly shady rugged landscape, as in The Virgin with the Infant Saint John the Baptist adoring the Christ Child accompanied by an Angel ('The Virgin of the Rocks'), was also a distinctive feature of Leonardo's work.

Style: High Renaissance
Christ kneels on a grassy hillock, hands folded in prayer. He looks up at an angel carrying a chalice, who floats in the sky in the top left. At the front, three men slumber, heads resting on their arms or hands. Groups of soldiers, wearing fantastic Renaissance versions of classical armour, approach from the sides.

This is the Agony in the Garden, as told in the Gospel of Mark (14: 32--43). At Gethsemane, Christ -- knowing that he has been betrayed and is to die -- takes Peter, James and John away from the other apostles and asks them to watch while he prays. As he asks God to 'take away this cup from me', the apostles repeatedly fall asleep. They fail to see the approaching soldiers, here led by Judas, who carries a bag holding the 30 pieces of silver given to him by the Jewish priests for leading them to Christ.

This painting was once thought to be by the young  Raphael, but is now attributed to Lo Spagna, another pupil of Pietro Perugino. It is based largely on Perugino's Agony in the Garden (Uffizi, Florence), which was painted in Florence in the 1490s, although our painting's composition is less geometrically controlled and the relative scale of some figures is unconvincing: Christ is too large compared to the apostles and the main group no longer form an approximately equilateral triangle. Individual figures derive from other works by Perugino -- the apostle on the right seems to be taken from his Transfiguration (Pinacoteca Vaticana, Rome), while the one opposite him is essentially the same figure rotated 90 degrees to achieve a balanced pair. The soldier leading the group on the right is based on The Archangel Michael, painted by Perugino between 1496 and 1500, making it likely that our painting was made after 1500.

Artists at this period used various techniques for designing pictures, including transferring figures from cartoons. Fragments of a pricked cartoon for the four principal figures in this painting are in the Uffizi, Florence. A closely related figure of Christ in Christ at Gethsemane is perhaps also by  Lo Spagna.

Style: High Renaissance
A young woman sits on a grassy bank spinning wool, distaff tucked under one arm. With a half-smile on her face, she looks with great concentration at her fingers untangling a lump in the wool. The twirling spindle hangs from her other hand. She’s young, yet she seems to be well practised in her craft -- something she would have learnt as a child and been expected to continue into adulthood.

Her white shirt, with its full sleeves and open neck, catches the evening sun. Her blue bodice is stiff, laced tightly at the front, her full skirts spread to cover her feet. Her hair is smoothed back into a knot behind her head, little tendrils falling onto her pale forehead. Her nose and cheeks are tinted a rosy pink.

Karel Dujardin has set the animals that the young woman tends in a line across the foreground of the picture. The curly fleeces of the sheep have been painted with great detail. One animal gazes out at us with limpid brown eyes, its wool almost honey coloured in the sun. The cows have their backs to us; one lies down, solid but comfortable in the warmth. The other, judging by its size and strength, is most likely a bull, seemingly on watch, staring hard into the distance. Its muscles and sinews are almost undefined in silhouette, but there's a sense of power suggested by the forward thrust of its head and shoulders and by the upward sweep of the horns.

The picture was painted early in Dujardin’s career, shortly after he returned from a stay in Rome. Other Dutch artists had gathered there to paint the Roman Campagna (the countryside around the city). He had studied with Nicolaes Berchem, one of the leaders of this group (who became known as the Italianates). Their representations of the mountainous Italian landscape littered with classical or ruined buildings and of the soft, golden light of Mediterranean skies were very popular with Dutch collectors.

Dujardin was no exception, but his paintings show a difference from the other artists in the group. Like them -- look at Berchem's Peasants with Cattle fording a Stream or Jan Both's A Rocky Italian Landscape with Herdsmen and Muleteers -- he shows this young woman and the animals against a background of distant mountains and a splendid Italian villa on the hillside. But while he does give a tinge of Italian gold to his sky, the rest is a crisp, clear blue, not common to his peers. It is as if he has used the colour of the sky to bridge the gap between his memory of Italy and the reality of the bright northern light of Amsterdam where he painted this picture.

Style: Baroque
Two saints -- Peter and Jerome -- stand on an extravagantly carved stone pedestal. They once formed the left wing of a triptych (an altarpiece in three parts) painted by Antonio Vivarini and his brother-in-law Giovanni d'Alemagna probably in the mid-1440s. The other wing is Saints Francis and Mark.

The saints' names have been painted as if carved into the pedestal and they hold their attributes -- the symbols traditionally associated with them. At the front is Peter, the first pope and one of the founders of the Catholic Church, grasping a pair of large gilded keys, which have been moulded out of pastiglia and gilded. These are the keys to the kingdom of heaven, which Christ gave Peter as a symbol of his spiritual power. In the same hand he grasps a fantastically bound book, representing the Gospels.

Behind him is Saint Jerome, one of the Fathers of the Church. Jerome was secretary to Pope Damasus I, so is often shown with the red robes and hat of a cardinal -- as in Crivelli's Saint Jerome -- although the office did not exist in his lifetime. He holds a bound book of the Bible, which he had translated into Latin; if you look closely you can see that rays of light from the book shine onto the church he holds, to show how Jerome's works illuminated religious understanding. To show off his skill at depicting objects at extreme angles, the artist has rotated it so we see the gilded edges and fluttering pages, a device also used by Crivelli (look at Saint Peter, for example).

Antonio and Giovanni collaborated on many paintings in a family workshop and it's very difficult to work out precisely which painter did which bit. Saint Peter's yellow robe has been hatched with black to simulate gold, a skill particular to the Vivarini workshop, and perhaps associated with Giovanni as it largely disappeared after his death. The bright colours of the saints' robes, the decorative details of their clothes and setting, and the three-dimensional gilding all contribute to the rich effect of this painting -- which would doubtless have been enhanced by the original gilded frame.

Style: Gothic, Early Renaissance
For at least a century before and after Hogarth painted The Shrimp Girl, most of the travelling sellers of shellfish in London were women, usually the daughters or wives of fishmongers in the market. The women would set out from Billingsgate Fish Market dressed in oilskin cloaks and sou'westers, a hat traditionally worn by fisherman, with the shellfish in a basket balanced on their heads. They would go through the London streets calling out which shellfish they had for sale and how much they cost per half-pint.

Hogarth sketched a half-pint measure in his shrimp girl's basket. A few darker shells suggest that she also sells mussels, and perhaps cockles, as well as shrimps. She wears a dark hat and cloak, probably of oilskin, but nothing can dim the sense of life and character she radiates. Her lips are spread in a smile -- or perhaps she's talking -- and we can see her teeth, which is unusual in portraits of the time and adds to the image's feeling of truth and immediacy. After Hogarth's death, when some critics tried to lessen his reputation, Mrs Hogarth reputedly liked to show visitors this picture and comment: 'They say he could not paint flesh and blood. There's flesh and blood for you: -- them!'

Although Hogarth may never have known the girl's name, this painting is certainly a portrait. Compared with the pictures of pretty street sellers which became popular some 50 years later, such as John Hoppner's Girl with Sallad (Colby College Art Museum, Waterville, Maine, USA), exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1782, and Francis Wheatley's Itinerant Trades of London, engraved 1793--5, Hogarth's image is direct and unpatronising. He recognises that the 'Shrimp Girl' is an individual in her own right, and does not presume to tidy her up.

We do not know of any similar single-figure oil sketches by Hogarth. The Shrimp Girl appears unique in being painted from life, spontaneously and for its own sake. It is thinly painted, without using many layers of paint to build up the forms, and the ground is still visible in many places. Particularly in the girl's dress and cloak, Hogarth's brushstrokes are broad, rough and unblended, in places looking almost as though he's scrubbed the canvas with his brush. The speed with which the picture was painted adds to its feeling of liveliness.

The Shrimp Girl remained in Hogarth's studio during the last 20 years or so of his life. He did not add a single brushstroke to her image, as he believed that 'if a thing is good, the action and the passion may be more truly and distinctly conveyed by a coarse bold stroke than the most delicate finishing'.

Style: Baroque, Rococo, Georgian
Jan Both was one of a group of Dutch artists that made the long and often dangerous journey across the Alps to Italy, said at the time to be the heart of great painting. He stayed for ten years, coming to admire and be influenced by the work of the great French landscape painter Claude, who was then living in Rome.

Both, like other Dutch artists in Italy, appears to have been more influenced by his surroundings than by the great Italian masters of the past and became a leader in the development of Dutch Italianate landscapes. His pictures often feature hardy peasants against softly glowing skies, sometimes against the architecture and monuments of ancient Rome, subverting the ideal of great art: large paintings of Bible stories or historical events. His influence is particularly clear in some works of Nicolaes Berchem -- for instance Mountainous Landscape with Muleteers. The contemporary Italian artist, Salvator Rosa, was scathing about their work -- particularly their interpretation of the Italian peasant as, in his view, idle and scruffy -- but Claude must have found their work agreeable, and even collaborated with Jan Both.

This painting is unusual for Both: he shows an urban view of architecture rather than a landscape, and his view of the Ripa Grande is partly imaginary. The Ripa Grande was the old port of Rome, at the foot of the Aventine, the furthest south of the seven hills of Rome; it had long since decayed. The tall central tower is just about recognisable as that of Santa Maria della Torre, although the windows are apparently different from the original. The tower stood on the banks of the Tiber beside the Ripa Grande, but the rest of the rundown buildings are Jan Both's invention.

Both's hardy peasants idle away their time playing cards in the evening sun. An old man leans on a boulder to smoke. A younger man squats out of the way, while another relieves himself against a wall. Up on the roof, others work under a makeshift canopy -- whether mending or dismantling, it's hard to tell. A man in a blue jacket perches precariously on the edge, stick in hand, a wide crack opening up in the wall beneath him.

One man, wearing a red hat, his hands clasped behind him, gazes intently at the view. Shown in more detail than the other characters, he ignores the man crouched beside him. The distant landscape he surveys is misty, and the gold light left by the vanished sun casts shadows over the still water of the River Tiber. It is as if he is looking so intensely in order to remember what he sees, as Both himself may once have done.

In other paintings that Both made of the Ripa Grande from a different viewpoint the scene is more recognisable. It seems that in making this picture on his return to the Netherlands, he is painting partly from memory and partly from his imagination, but always with affection for the sunlit land he had left.

Style: Baroque
This is one of a pair of panels that flanked a central image of the Trinity: God the Father with Christ and the Holy Ghost in the form of a dove. It includes a diverse range of angels. The angel-like figures in red, with six wings and red flames upon their heads, are seraphim. They have chubby faces and short, curly hair. Winged figures in blue have similar features but blue flames upon their heads. They are the cherubim, a different rank of angelic being.

Below them hover four other angels. Two wear coloured robes; one plays a fiddle and another the double recorder. In front of them is another pair, dressed in white, who both swing thuribles containing incense. The one at the front holds a boat-shaped vessel called a nef which was used to hold incense.

The heavenly figures in this panel are decorative but they also look towards the scared image of the Trinity at the centre in adoration, emphasising its importance. The music they play and the incense they swing suggests a multi-sensory experience and encourages the viewer to imagine the sounds and scents of heaven.

Style: Gothic, Early Renaissance