wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
A profusion of summer flowers has been packed tightly into an almost invisible vase. The bouquet seems to hang in space against a distinctive mottled background, suspended from the three blue spires -- delphiniums in the centre and on the right, a larkspur on the left -- that emerge from the crowd of blossom. The larkspur was chosen to counterpoint the deeper blue of the delphiniums but also to demonstrate Fantin-Latour’s extensive knowledge of the flowers he painted.

On the left, pink begonias are tucked among several varieties of rose, and one of the flower heads has drifted down on to the table. A strong diagonal line leads up to belladonna lilies, their pale pink trumpets streaked with cerise. Two dahlias -- one red, one yellow -- nestle in at the top of the arrangement, but it’s the brilliant white of the phlox, radiant against the palest pink of the surrounding roses, that sets off the kaleidoscope of colours around it.

Fantin-Latour lived in Paris, but this picture was exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1898. It's possible that he produced it while visiting his lifelong friends and patrons, Mr and Mrs Edwin Edwards, in Richmond. The couple not only bought his pictures but acted as his agents in England, and were instrumental in making him rich and successful in the country; perhaps surprisingly, his paintings sold very little in France. The double portrait that the couple commissioned from him is also in the National Gallery, on loan from Tate, to whom it was bequeathed by Mrs Edwards.

The Edwards were part of the opulent, sophisticated world of Victorian society in London, but Fantin-Latour chose to remain in Paris in a quite different atmosphere. His friends and acquaintances there were Courbet, Manet and the Impressionists -- yet he never adopted their style of painting. His was more academic, with almost invisible brushstrokes and a smooth finish, much preferred in Victorian drawing rooms. But in Paris, as he wrote, ‘if one never sells anything, yet one has perfect liberty to paint what one likes'.

Fantin-Latour was influenced by the work of earlier flower painters, particularly seventeenth-century Dutch artists. In this picture he has perhaps been looking at the later paintings of Jan van Huysum -- whose Flowers in a Terracotta Vase is also in the National Gallery's collection -- using his light, plain background and asymmetric, crowded arrangement. But the drowsy haze of summer and the sudden sparkle made by the pear-drop-shaped foot of the vase are Fantin-Latour’s own assured touches, making such a picture of great appeal to discerning collectors.

Style: Realist
The Virgin Mary is seated with her cousin Saint Elizabeth and their sons in a rocky landscape. The infant Christ reclines on his mother’s lap resting against her arm. Due to damage it is difficult to make out the gesture of his right hand. He leans his head back and laughs mischievously.

This is a reduced version of the 'Tallard Madonna' (State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg) signed by Andrea del Sarto, which shows the Madonna and Child with Saints Elizabeth, John the Baptist and Catherine in a lively scene conversing with one another. Saint Catherine is missing from the National Gallery version and there are also a few other small differences: in the 'Tallard Madonna' Christ turns back to look at Saint Catherine (who gazes at the viewer) and points to direct her attention to Saint Elizabeth; the figures are also slightly larger in scale. There is another copy of the Hermitage picture in the Royal Collection, Windsor.

The Virgin’s hands support her son’s back and rest on his leg in a very natural way, as though Sarto has observed and drawn from a real mother and child. The infant John the Baptist nestles beneath his mother’s protective arm and leans against her raised knee. He is pointing to something but it is not clear what that is. His reed cross and scroll inscribed 'Ecce Agnus Dei' ('Behold the Lamb of God') lie on the ground at his feet. They remind the viewer of Christ’s future crucifixion and sacrifice for humanity.

This type of picture in which the Virgin is surrounded by saints is known as a sacra conversazione. The gestures and interconnected glances suggest a psychological exchange.

The oval face of the Virgin with her small round dark eyes is a recognisable trait of Andrea del Sarto’s figures, and may be based on the features of his wife, Lucrezia del Fede. Sculptural draperies with angular folds, seen here in Saint Elizabeth’s robes, are also typical of his work, and are evident in the voluminous blue sleeve of his Portrait of a Young Man.

There are many pentimenti -- instances where the artist changed his mind during painting -- suggesting that this is an original work by Sarto, possibly with studio assistance in less important areas such as the landscape. The dark lines of the underdrawing can also be seen through the paint in some parts, particularly the flesh. Some of the changes altered the picture so that in its final form it was more like the 'Tallard Madonna', suggesting that the National Gallery's picture may have been made first.

Style: High Renaissance
During the nineteenth century this theatrical painting was believed to represent the Teatro Farnese in Parma, but it is more likely to be an imaginary scene than a view of a theatre that actually existed. It may have been inspired by stage designs by the Bibiena family from Bologna, which were reproduced as perspective prints. The Bibiena family were known for their highly ornate Baroque theatrical sets produced for festivities, weddings and operas at many European courts, especially the Hapsburg court.

The anonymous artist who painted this picture probably worked in the same geographical area as the Bibienas, which included southern Germany and Austria as well as northern Italy. The painting is a triumph of linear perspective, creating an extremely accurate and entirely believable three-dimensional interior space. It has been compared to the scenic designs of Stephan Schenk (Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich), who was a pupil and collaborator of Alessandro Galli-Bibiena (1687--1769).

The extremely splendid and spacious set is lined with statues on tall plinths, which appear to represent, from front to back, on the right: Jupiter, Venus (?), Hercules and a goddess; and on the left: a god, Mars, Ceres and Bacchus. The proscenium arch is decorated with various statues and two reliefs of Apollo flaying Marsyas and Pan pursuing Syrinx. At the top of the arch are two blank joined cartouches surmounted by a crown and guarded by lions, appropriate for the coat of arms of a prince of the Holy Roman Empire.

The performance has sometimes been identified as Othello because of the presence of a Moor centre stage, but it is more likely to be an Italian opera than a British play. Moorish characters frequently appeared in eighteenth-century Italian operas and the figures on stage seem to be wearing operatic costumes. An audience of fashionably dressed spectators promenades in the space usually reserved for musicians, suggesting that they are included to create a sense of architectural scale rather than to make an accurate record of an actual performance. The date of the painting is unknown, although the costumes of the audience suggest that it was made in the first half of the eighteenth century.

Style: Baroque, Academic, Rococo, Neoclassical
This portrait raises all the questions usually prompted by an unidentified sitter: who is this person, where is he, how old is he? The dark background gives us no information as to his whereabouts. Against it, the young man's hair shines deep auburn, falling in waves down to his collar, which is edged with fine lace. His white shirt puffs out through the slashing in his sleeve and two white tassels hang on his chest over the tiny buttons of his jacket.

There's no doubt that this man dressed up to have his portrait painted, but his clothes suggest that he's not short of money nor is he disinterested in the latest fashions, whatever he might have worn normally. His blue eyes, turned slightly to the right, look out into the distance, though the focus of his gaze is perhaps a little uneven. His features are fairly heavy -- arched brows, a low forehead and a cleft chin -- but they are youthful and still a little unformed, and his moustache struggles to make itself seen.

When this work entered the National Gallery's collection in 1899, it was described as a self-portrait of the Dutch artist Karel Dujardin, thanks in part to a signature on the left of the picture, level with the young man's shoulder. However, this signature turned out to be false and was removed during conservation treatment in the early 1980s. It has since been suggested that the portrait is by a seventeenth-century French artist, but a firm attribution remains elusive.

X-ray images taken of the painting throw up another conundrum. They show a second head directly beside that of the young man: a woman wearing a low-necked dress. It's almost as if the two faces are joined at the centre and look in opposite directions. Careful scrutiny reveals a third head a little above the others, but far less distinct; it has been suggested that this is a first attempt at the portrait we see now. But most evocative are the swirls of paint now invisible under the black background, whose pink and white colour were confirmed by cross-sections. These were probably made by the artist wiping excess paint from his brush onto the canvas, giving us a very real connection to this anonymous maker's working practice.

Style: Baroque
This painting is probably a collaboration between Jan Wijnants, who was a specialist landscape painter, and Jan Lingelbach, who added the figures and the animals once the landscape was finished. It was not unusual for painters to work in this way in seventeenth-century Holland.

What we see is probably not a specific location, but it is characteristic of the undulating fields and dunes between Wijnants' home town of Haarlem and the sea. He has probably adapted the view to help give an impression of distance, perhaps placing the stand of trees and the church, as well as the patches of sunlight and the billowing clouds, to enhance the sense of depth.

Lingelbach’s figures are also positioned for effect, and he uses patches of red and brown on their clothing to help them stand out. They lead our eye further into the landscape, while the silhouettes of two men and a dog on the top of the dune add a moment of drama against the turbulent sky.

Style: Baroque
This is the third and final panel in a series based on a fourteenth-century story about a peasant girl, Griselda, who was put through a series of tests by her rich husband, the Marquis Gualtieri di Saluzzo. After pretending to annul their marriage and sending Griselda back to her parents' house, the Marquis, in his final act of cruelty, tells that he was to marry again, and asks her to arrange the wedding festivities. Remarkably, she obeys: we see her at the far left of the panel, sweeping the floor.

The elaborate wedding procession coming down the hillside includes camels, as well as horses draped in fine fabrics. At the far right of the panel we see Griselda greet a woman with long fair hair and a red gown. Unknown to Griselda, this is her daughter. In a former test, the Marquis had claimed that his and Griselda's children were killed during infancy; now he pretends that his daughter is to be his wife. Eventually, the Marquis reveals his tests and is reunited with Griselda; her faithfulness has renewed his love for her and the celebration becomes their own. Her loyalty throughout her ordeal earned her fame and respect and she became a model of wifely virtue.

The panels were commissioned for a room in the Spanocchi family palace in Siena; they were probably made to celebrate a marriage which took place in January 1494. It is possible they weren't all ready at the time of the wedding celebrations but this one -- the story's happy ending -- might have been made first, just in time for the festivities. Its style is quite different from the others, especially Exile, the last panel made.

This is most evident if we compare the draperies here, for example of the woman in red to the far left, with those in Exile. The edges of her gown seem to billow up as though blown by a strong breeze, a decorative effect that does not appear in the other panels, where the draperies are simpler and follow the forms of the figures more closely. Here, the figures are also quite stiff, with straight, upright backs; in the panels illustrating  the couple's marriage and Griselda's exile the bodies appear natural and flexible.

Style: Early Renaissance
Two elegantly dressed couples have been making music on the banks of a small stream. The young man in the foreground seems to have paused from playing his fiddle and turned to watch the amorous couple on the other bank. The lady reclines beside her lover, caressing his knee and apparently about to lay her head in his lap; a lute and music lie abandoned on the grass. Music and playing instruments are frequently associated with lovemaking in the art and writing of this period. The pair of doves beside the foreground couple and the roses held by the lady -- both attributes of Venus -- suggest that they are also lovers.

The two other pairs of figures standing in the distant meadows appear to be peasants or pilgrims as they are barefoot and one carries a staff. The four pairs of figures, decreasing in size, are positioned on a diagonal into the depth of the picture. With the implied diagonal formed by the trees and the mountain, this serves to draw our eye to the vanishing point on the horizon at the extreme right edge of the painting. The purpose of these diagonal lines meeting at a vanishing point is to create a believable sense of pictorial space. The artist has also used aerial perspective to enhance the sense of distance in the landscape -- the mountains appear blue when seen from so far away.

The costume in this painting dates from about 1540 and is particular to the area around the north Italian city of Brescia. It is so provincial as to almost amount to regional dress. The standing lady wears a short gown, which is extremely unusual, revealing her stockings and shoes. Stockings appear very rarely in sixteenth-century paintings of women. When they do, it is usually because a longer dress has been looped up. The diagonal slashes and trimming on the male costumes are also very unusual -- diagonal patterns are rarely seen in sixteenth-century Italian costumes. The trees also appear to be growing slanted on a diagonal.

This work belongs to the sixteenth-century Venetian tradition of pictures of couples making music outdoors in the countryside, the most famous example of which is Titian's Concert Champêtre (Louvre, Paris) of about 1511. The painting was formerly thought to be Venetian and by a follower of Giorgione. However, the Brescian costume and subject matter suggest that it was painted by a provincial artist influenced by the work of Giorgione and Titian but working outside Venice. The buildings and other features of the background are similar to those in The Madonna and Child and the two doves resemble those in the basket in the Adoration of the Shepherds attributed to Bernardino da Asola.

Style: High Renaissance
A young man cradles a bottle, presumably full of wine, and drinks from a smooth-sided glass. Vine leaves, a symbol traditionally associated with Bacchus, the mischievous god of wine, garland his head. He looks at us with a conspiratorial gaze and, though he might appear to be encouraging us to join him, the possessive way in which he guards the bottle suggests that he might well keep its contents all to himself.

Genre paintings are rare in the work of Murillo, and the subject of this picture remains enigmatic. The young man may be drinking wine, but he is doing so with dignity and care, holding the glass daintily by its base. He is perhaps a server at a tavern – the cloth draped nonchalantly over his shoulder seems to suggest this – but the reference to Bacchus better explains his mischievous expression.

The painting’s subject may be inspired by seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish representations of everyday life, particularly those of peasants drinking in rowdy taverns. The framing of the composition, with a life-size figure leaning on a stone ledge, finds parallels in both Murillo’s Self Portrait and A Peasant Boy leaning on a Sill.

The painting, which was considered to be by Murillo in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, entered the collection of the National Gallery in 1889 as a work by the master. Doubts were raised about the attribution in the mid-twentieth century, when it was tentatively ascribed to a French eighteenth-century imitator, but research and a conservation treatment conducted in 2021–22 have confirmed that it was, in fact, painted by Murillo.

Style: Baroque, Neoclassical
The episode of Christ washing the feet of his disciples is told in the Gospel of John (13:2--17). After supper with his disciples Christ rose and began to wash their feet. Peter said he could not allow this, but Christ replied that if Peter would not allow him to wash his feet then he had no place with him. Peter asked Christ to wash his hands and head as well, but Christ said that those who were clean only needed to have their feet washed. He then instructed the disciples to wash one another's feet.

The painting is first recorded in the chapel of the Most Holy Sacrament in the Church of S. Trovaso in Venice. This chapel was the responsibility of the Scuola di Santissimo Sacramento (Confraternity of the Most Sacred Sacrament) -- which is still active in the city today -- and they must have commissioned the painting in about 1575--80. It was the confraternity's responsibility to accompany the Sacrament with a lantern and a bell to the houses of the sick. Tintoretto's Christ washing the Feet of the Disciples originally hung on the right of the altar and his Last Supper (still in the chapel today) hung on the left.

Tintoretto has set the washing of the feet in a large room with a fire beneath a massive hood and a long table at an angle on the left. There are 12 people present excluding the servant woman, who appears from behind the curtain at the back of the room to the left -- this means that Judas, who would betray Christ, must have already left. This is unusual: Judas is normally included in paintings of this episode by other artists as well as by Tintoretto. He might have been left out because he was shown leaving the table in The Last Supper, which Tintoretto may have painted first, in about 1563--4.

Christ washing the Feet of the Disciples illustrates the need for self-abasement and fraternal love, as well as for purification by Baptism and Penance. Penance was required before receiving communion. The Counter-Reformation Church placed renewed emphasis on the proper preparation for receiving communion, which may explain the popularity of this episode as a subject for chapels of the Sacrament in late sixteenth-century Italy. Such paintings were often commissioned by confraternities, which emphasised charitable acts and duty to one another.

Christ washing the Feet of the Disciples is painted on a black ground on which Tintoretto first sketched the composition in white paint. Some of this white brush drawing is now visible on the worn surface of the painting, for example in the legs of the torch-bearing disciple at the front left, in Peter's shoulder, in the architecture in the background and in the brass basin. In many places the paint has darkened and  become translucent, which now makes the blacks more dominant than Tintoretto can have intended. The chequered floor is largely repainted, in a much less subtle manner than that in Tintoretto's Last Supper, which it probably originally would have resembled.

Style: High Renaissance
The saint in this painting carries a bishop’s crosier and wears the white habit of the Carthusian Order. The Carthusians were an enclosed Catholic religious order of monks and nuns founded by Bruno of Cologne in 1084. Bruno was called to Rome by Pope Urban II, and while there founded a new hermitage in Calabria in southern Italy.

The way that the crosier has been cropped suggests that the panel may have been cut down from a larger painting. The inscription ‘S~ UGO’ (Italian for Saint Hugh) may be a later addition and it is not certain whether Saint Hugh of Grenoble (1053--1132) or Saint Hugh of Lincoln (1135/40--1200) is represented. Both of these saints were Carthusians. However, the white habit may have been underpainted only and left unfinished.

The saint is represented with a shaved head, his hood up against a plain black background. He is brightly lit from top right, which is unusual, and suggests that the picture was made for a specific location with natural lighting from that direction. The stark light emphasises every line and wrinkle on the saint's face and reflects with uncompromising realism from the smooth, glossy surface of his forehead.

We do not know who painted this picture. It has previously been attributed to Mansueti and to Lodovico da Parma, who were both working in the sixteenth century, but neither identification is convincing.

Style: High Renaissance
There are two seventeenth-century Dutch paintings with this distinctly unglamorous title in the National Gallery’s collection. The other, attributed to Pieter van den Bosch, was painted about ten years before this one, and is a much more naturalistic scene of a woman at work in a kitchen. It evokes a sense of the calm, order and simplicity of everyday routine and of the virtue of labour.

These themes are also present in Schalcken’s painting. The old woman is quietly absorbed in polishing the glowing brass of a large pan. Its inside catches the light, illuminating her arms and face; other objects on the sill also gleam in the daylight. It is these which give the scouring a different, darker significance and clearly identify the picture as a vanitas ('vanity', symbolising the transience of life).

The broken pot, right in the centre, looks rather odd to our eye, but Schalcken’s customers would have understood a clear suggestion of fragility and vulnerability to the ravages of time. The candlestick, tipped on its side, suggests the same. Candles, which burn for a limited time before they are blown out or gutter and die, were a common analogy for mortality. The butterfly, which has apparently settled innocently on the stone at the side of the painting, is another subtle signifier: they were known to enjoy the briefest of lives. All this casts the woman’s work into another light. It might still be considered virtuous but it is also, ultimately, futile.

Today, we might find it hard to understand the appeal of hanging a reminder of our mortality up on the living room wall. But at the time it was quite normal. Plenty of vanitas paintings were much more explicit than this one, even including a skull to drive the point home. The moral of these paintings was not a negative one. It was an attempt to contrast the transience of worldly life with the everlasting nature of faith and Christian redemption. And they could also been seen as a reminder to make the most of our life, before it is taken from us.

Such paintings were also a chance for artists to demonstrate their ability to depict objects, and people, with lifelike precision. Schalcken’s teacher Gerrit Dou, was a master of this. Schalcken learned from him, and also borrowed the format of stone arch (or niche) to frame the old lady. Dou's niche paintings, normally of tradespeople at work, were very popular in his native Leiden and the framing device was often copied by other artists. In this picture, Schalcken has simplified the composition. There is a particularly clear contrast between light and shade -- the interior of the room is so dark that we can’t make out any of its details.

Style: Baroque