wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
Seurat produced many sketches and drawings as studies for his monumental painting A Sunday on La Grande Jatte of 1884--6 (Art Institute of Chicago). Many of these concentrate on the landscape but others, including this one, focus on the figures, either individually or as groups. In these figure studies, the landscape often functions as a stage set within which Seurat experiments with the scale and position of people who will eventually populate the final painting.

In this study, we see a man standing on the right. A few other less-defined people can be seen in the background. Reduced to his essential outline and with no incidental detail, he has the appearance of a cut-out paper figure placed on the canvas. Like most of the people in the Grande Jatte, we see him in profile as he looks straight ahead at the river. Seurat had already introduced this man in an earlier oil sketch (Art Institute of Chicago), positioned on the far right-hand edge, and he appears in the final painting. His size and location in this sketch are close to the final picture, but there he is accompanied by an elegantly dressed woman. As she stands to his left, she partly blocks our view of him, although his face and the front of his body are still visible. In this sketch, he wears a black top hat, a long grey jacket or coat and dark trousers, clothes which he wears in the final painting and which identify him as a member of the middle or upper classes and, perhaps, as a dandy. He also holds what might be a walking cane or a furled umbrella and what may be a folded blanket or groundsheet. In the final picture, however, he is clearly carrying a cane under his left arm, which now points upwards to the right, and he holds a cigar in his right hand. It is his female companion who carries an umbrella, which she has opened to shield herself from the sun.

As in the Grande Jatte, the large grassy area fills most of the picture. Seurat has divided this between a shaded foreground (with a preponderance of blue alongside a dark green) and a sunlit middle area (where a golden-yellow is combined with a light green). Compared to the other Study for 'La Grande Jatte' in the National Gallery’s collection, there is a reduced range of colours. As Seurat had not yet fully developed the pointillist technique he used in the painitng itself, the sketch may date to 1884--5.

It is possible that Seurat painted this study in the studio rather than on location. As in many of the sketches and paintings he made along this area of the river Seine, he attends to the interplay between the horizontal and vertical lines offered by the location, which provided a ready-made architecture or grid within which he could arrange individual elements. Here the man’s rigid upright pose, which gives him the look of a tailor’s mannequin, forms a strong vertical that visually rhymes with the trees.

Style: Pointillist
Of the  Studies for Bathers at Asnières in the National Gallery’s collection related to Seurat's Bathers at Asnières, this oil sketch on wood is perhaps the one most closely connected with the final painting. Unlike other sketches, which concentrate on atmospheric effects or the landscape, Seurat’s focus here is almost exclusively on the men and boys themselves. Only two -- the clothed man lying down in the lower left corner and the young man with the bare torso at the river’s edge on the right of the picture -- are retained in the final painting. The nude standing boy in the middle of the sketch eventually became the boy standing waist-high in the river.

The five figures are shown in a variety of poses and fill the picture space with only a minimal indication of the surrounding landscape. As the two larger figures on the right are drawn to a different scale to those on the left, this panel is like a page from a sketchbook, where Seurat is less concerned with the overall composition than in trying out ideas for the poses and positions of the figures, both individually and as a group.

Style: Pointillist
A old women, her gaze unfocused, clutches a rosary -- a string of beads used in prayer -- tightly in her hands. According to the writer Joachim Gasquet, the sitter was a former nun who had escaped from a convent, wandering aimlessly until Cezanne took her on as a servant.

Gasquet found this painting in 1896 at Cezanne's family house near Aix-en-Provence, lying on the floor of the artist's studio with a pipe dripping on it. The lower left-hand corner is marked by splashed water or steam.

Style: Impressionist
Between 1882 and 1886 Seurat made more than 100 identically sized landscape studies. These panels look like they were painted on site, and follow the long-established tradition of the plein-air oil sketch. Many were preparatory studies for his first two monumental paintings -- Bathers at Asnières (1884) and A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884--6, Art Institute of Chicago). After the exhibition of the Grande Jatte, Seurat continued to work occasionally in the adjacent suburbs of Courbevoie and Asnières in north-west Paris, the setting for both paintings.

This panel was most likely painted in 1885 and relates to a medium-size canvas, The Seine at Courbevoie (private collection, Paris). It may have preceded Seurat’s decision to paint this particular view of the river, or it may be a preparatory study for the painting. The vertical format is unusual for Seurat, but it allowed him to arrange the composition as a series of stacked horizontal bands formed by the foreground, the river, the far riverbank and the houses and trees of Courbevoie in the distance. Although we are looking across the water towards the opposite riverbank some distance away, these lateral bands reduce the effect of spatial depth and atmospheric recession, as does the placing of the sky near the very top of the picture. The bands are, however, counterbalanced by the continuous vertical of the tree trunk on the right and the shorter vertical of the standing woman on the left, her brown dress partly echoing the darker brown of the tree. Although Seurat has focused on the landscape in this sketch, many of its components are reiterated from the Grande Jatte -- for example, the river Seine and its grassy bank, a standing female figure, the emphatic vertical of the tree and the high skyline.

A focus on the underlying structure of the scene is a feature of Seurat’s art, but his application of the paint softens the geometry of the composition. Although Seurat had developed his pointillist technique by 1885, his debt to Impressionism is still evident here, and the freshness of his brushwork especially recalls the earlier work of Monet and Pissarro. Seurat worked rapidly, leaving traces of the bare wood of the panel visible between the brushstrokes. Unlike in some of his sketches, he has not built up the brushwork in layers, although some areas are more densely worked (for example, the roof tops where the colours have mixed together while still wet). The individual strokes themselves are relatively large and fluid, unlike the tighter, more uniform brushwork of pointillism, and are laid down as clean, unmixed colours. Seurat has also modified them according to the object or surface they describe. For example, he has used horizontal lozenge-like strokes for the shimmering water (which recall Monet’s brushwork in Bathers at La Grenouillère), shorter, choppier strokes for the grass and foliage, and longer, sinuous strokes for the tree trunk. The pale yellows and whites used throughout much of the painting create an effect of warm sunlight and contrast with the dark border formed by the tree and the touches of dark green at the very bottom of the picture.

Style: Pointillist
The Château Noir was a rambling house situated in extensive grounds between Aix-en-Provence and Le Tholonet in the south of France. Cezanne rented a small room in the house from 1897 and tried, unsuccessfully, to buy the property two years later when his family home, the Jas de Bouffan, was sold. Surrounded by wild vegetation, the run-down buildings of the isolated chateau offered Cezanne a variety of motifs, and it became one of his favourite locations. Although he stopped renting a room in 1902, when he moved into his newly completed studio at nearby Les Lauves, he continued to paint in the grounds until his death in 1906, travelling there by hired car.

We are looking at a group of trees growing along a remote rocky ridge on a hill north-east of the house. The diagonal slope of the hill is so steep that the rocks seem close to tumbling out of the frame. However, just as objects do not fall from the tilted tabletops in many of Cezanne’s still-life paintings, these boulders remain in place as if defying gravity. Dense woodland that writhes up from the rocks forms a screen that almost blocks out the sky, which we only glimpse towards the top of the picture as areas of pale blue. Some light, indicated by patches of blue on the ground, does filter through gaps in the thick foliage -- an instance of  Cezanne’s statement to the artist and writer Maurice Denis that 'it is impossible to reproduce light, it must be represented by something else, by colours'.

A small patch of orange near the picture’s centre provides a focal point that is echoed by the orange-ochre and browns of the ground. Although these warmer tones contrast with the cooler greens and slate greys of the tree trunks and foliage, the picture’s overall palette of grey, brown and deep green remains dark. These colours, together with Cezanne’s use of overlapping faceted brushstrokes to create an almost sculptural effect, were to be adopted by Picasso and Braque during the early stages of Cubism in the first decade of the twentieth century.

The picture's sombre colours, in conjunction with the high horizon and barely visible sky, also contribute to its somewhat oppressive, even claustrophobic atmosphere, which is very different from the bright tones and almost classical formal balance of Avenue at Chantilly, painted some ten years earlier. While the earlier painting leads our eye into the landscape, our vision here is blocked by the rocks and trees and remains trapped within the picture’s shallow space. In his final years Cezanne was increasingly drawn to harsh landscapes untouched by human intervention, perhaps finding in their stark grandeur and elemental power an image of his own dark moods, and maybe an echo of the violence within some of his earliest work.

Style: Impressionist
A boy has paused from the thirsty work of herding sheep at noon to lie flat on the bank of a pool and drink its cool water. This vision of a Suffolk lane in high summer was painted in January to March 1826 in Constable's studio in London.

The lane winding into the cornfield was based on Fen Lane, along which Constable had often walked as a boy from his own village of East Bergholt to Dedham, where he attended school. The lane still exists but the countryside shown beyond it was largely conjured up in Constable's studio. The church tower and cluster of red-roofed houses 'never existed', as the artist's son Charles Constable was later to point out -- Constable invented the village to provide a distant focal point beyond the bend of the river. His resolve to be a 'natural painter' did not mean that he depicted everything faithfully.

Constable completed the painting by 8 April 1826, when he dispatched it titled 'Landscape' to the Royal Academy for the exhibition opening to the public on 1 May. Shortage of time had forced him to work quickly. He had intended to exhibit his large Waterloo Bridge but had to lay it aside on account of 'the ruinous state of my finances'. Although not as large as his 'six-footers', The Cornfield was of a sufficient size to continue Constable's bid for attention at the Royal Academy for his monumental scenes of the Stour Valley.

A wooded lane leading to a more sunlit landscape was a recurrent feature of Constable's compositions, and is reminiscent of the work of both the Dutch painter van Ruisdael, and Suffolk-born Gainsborough, which Constable admired. His first idea for The Cornfield is expressed in a very free oil sketch now in the Indianapolis Museum of Art. He then produced an oil study of just the landscape (now on loan to the City Museums and Art Gallery, Birmingham). The finished picture closely follows the landscape contours of the Birmingham study and echoes its light. The detail of the boy drinking was taken from an oil sketch made some 15 years earlier, probably also in Fen Lane.

Constable remarked to his friend Fisher: 'I do hope to sell this present picture -- as it has certainly got a little more eye-salve than I usually give them.' By 'eye-salve' he probably meant picturesque details such as the drinking boy, the donkeys grazing the bank dotted with poppies and cow parsley, the flock of sheep, distant village and meandering river. The cornfield itself is painted with masterly economy: just a few vertical brushstrokes at the field's edge suggest the tall wheat, while broader brushstrokes convey the undulating sweep of the field.

Despite receiving critical praise, the painting failed to sell, either at the Royal Academy or at any of the four other exhibitions to which Constable sent it. It was named The Cornfield by the committee of friends and admirers that finally bought it and presented it to the National Gallery in 1837 after Constable's death. It was the first picture by Constable to enter the national collection.

Style: Romantic, Georgian
This is the last in the series The Four Times of Day that Corot painted for his friend, fellow artist Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps. It is a rare example of a night scene by him, as he only painted a handful of nocturnal views. As in Morning, we see a single figure, probably a man,  accompanied by a dog.  He wears a red cap -- a motif that appears throughout the sequence -- and uses a staff. There is a sense of the journey home at the end of the day.

As the day ends, colour drains from the landscape and we return to the near-monochrome tones of Morning, but now in a darker key. The sky has turned dark blue, becoming grey near the top of the picture, and is dotted with white stars. A very bright star (or tiny moon) shines above the highest house on the hilltop. The houses that cling to the hill and the square tower hint at an Italian landscape -- a suggestion which extends the possible reference to Italy introduced by the figure of the monk in Evening.

Corot’s visits to Italy had a profound effect upon his art. It was in Rome, in the spring of 1826, that he began painting series of views of the same scene or building at various times of the day to show different lighting conditions. In accordance with the advice of Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, these were typically groups of three sketches painted in the morning, at noon and in the early evening. Beginning in 1827, Corot also painted pictures in pairs, to be hung together, which contrasted morning and evening light. Such landscapes often included people carrying out daily tasks that were appropriate for the specific moment.

In The Four Times of Day this practice of painting series meshes with an aspect of Corot’s art that first appeared in the 1850s -- namely, his painting of souvenirs (‘memories’). These souvenirs were less ‘views’ of specific locations but were instead poetic reminiscences of a place in which feeling or mood, rather than topographical accuracy, were Corot’s primary concern. Reviewing Corot’s work in the Salon of 1861, the critic Théodore de Banville wrote of him, ‘This is not a landscape painter, this is the very poet of landscape … who breathes the sadness and joys of nature … The bond, that great bond that makes us brothers of brooks and trees, he sees it; his figures, as poetic as his forests, are not strangers in the woodland that surrounds them.’ Although The Four Times of Day does not achieve the full poetic reverie of Souvenirs painted in the 1860s and 1870s, Banville’s comments -- particularly his observation on how Corot’s figures are at home in the landscape -- could be taken to apply to this series.

In part a ‘memory’ of his time in Italy and an evocation of the forests at Fontainebleau, The Four Times of Day is also a synthesis of the influences that shaped Corot’s art -- the classical landscapes of Claude, the fêtes galantes of eighteenth-century French painting and the practice of sketching in oils outdoors.

Style: Barbizon
This is the second in the series The Four Times of Day that Corot painted for his friend, fellow artist Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps. The light source in Morning is from the back and to the right of the picture. In Noon the light has increased and is more evenly distributed, as maximum visual clarity is achieved. In his book Éléments de perspective pratique,  Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes had particularly urged painters to seize the intense bright light of noon when ‘Nature [is] prey to the devouring fires of high summer [and] the shadows cast are barely longer than the bodies that produce them.'

There is also general lightening of tone that can be seen most clearly in the tree trunks, pale blue sky and distant hills. As he often did, Corot  has added white paint to achieve this – a technique adopted by Pissarro. There is also a greater differentiation of colours -- for example, the dark brownish-green foliage in Morning has been replaced by foliage consisting of green and pale grey. The application of the paint is still sketchy, and you can see traces of the paintbrush’s bristle in several places.

Nearest to us, a young man in a white shirt and red hat rests his left foot upon a rock as he adjusts his shoe. Unlike the figure in Morning, we can see his face (in profile) and there is greater detail to his clothing. Lit from above, he barely casts a shadow -- in keeping with Valenciennes’ observation. Further back, a man with a walking stick and a woman wearing a white hat walk along the path, although their direction of travel is unclear. As the woman (on the left) appears to be moving away from us, while the man seems to be coming towards us, they are perhaps passing each other rather than walking together.

Style: Barbizon
Jean-Louis-André-Théodore Géricault was a keen horseman, and his passion for horses was matched by his expert understanding of their anatomy. Unlike England, France did not have an established tradition of horse painting. However, there were French artists who specialised in painting horses -- such as the fashionable Carle Vernet, himself an avid horseman and with whom the young Géricault had trained -- and a market for these pictures.

It is likely that Géricault painted this picture in 1813 or 1814, soon after he had successfully exhibited a huge canvas, The Charging Chasseur (also known as An Officer of the Imperial Horse Guard Charging, Louvre, Paris) at the Salon of 1812, for which he was awarded a gold medal. In 1813 he produced a number of oil studies and finished paintings of horses at the Imperial stables at Versailles, possibly including this one, showing them either in groups or individually. In contrast to the action and movement of The Charging Chasseur, these paintings are characterised by close observation and detailed naturalism.

In this picture we see a fine thoroughbred, possibly of Arabian stock. Géricault has shown the moment it reacts to a bolt of lightning (in the upper right corner), and presumably the accompanying clap of thunder. He avoided the more dramatic, and perhaps rather clichéd, image of a horse rearing, instead showing the animal in profile as it freezes in fear. Only its startled eye -- the white just visible -- and the trace of drool from its mouth suggest its terror. Géricault brilliantly captured the sheen of its dappled coat as it is momentarily lit up against the near blackness of the night sky. He used short, staccato strokes of liquid paint, which precisely follow the contours of the horse's body, to create an effect of nervous energy that ripples across its silky surface.

Unlike the pictures of horses in their stables at Versailles, Gericault has excluded any human presence or incidental detail, such as riding equipment or an identifiable location. Instead, his attention -- and ours -- is entirely focused on the horse. Filling the picture space, it exists beyond passing changes in fashion and style. Like George Stubbs's masterpiece Whistlejacket, Gericault’s painting is a portrait of a specific horse, with its own distinct characteristics, rather than a generic study of a type or breed. Although showing a frightened animal, Géricault has avoided sentimentalism. Nor has he humanised its reaction to the lightning. But like Stubbs's picture, his precise observation of this particular horse also draws upon classical precedents. The side view recalls classical friezes, whose impact upon Géricault’s paintings of horses and of horse racing was to become more pronounced when he visited Italy between 1816 and 1817.

Style: Romantic
Painted around 1800, this small oil sketch on canvas by the Belgian artist Simon Denis is a fine example of the type of study produced by artists working in Italy from about 1780 to 1850, who painted swiftly and directly from nature. Corot’s The Roman Campagna, with the Claudian Aqueduct, painted in the same region some 25 years later, is another excellent example. Most of these studies were unsigned and undated, but an inscription on the back of this picture confirms it is by Denis, who was in Rome from 1786 to about 1803.

Soon after Denis arrived in Rome, having previously studied in Paris, his work began to attract attention. Although his finished landscapes tended to be exercises in finely detailed late eighteenth-century classicism, he was also well-known for his outdoor sketching. The relative freedom of these oil studies is very different from his more formal landscapes and Denis was particularly praised for his ability to capture fleeting atmospheric effects. While in Paris, he may have met the painter and writer Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, who had recently returned from Rome where he had been working for four years. Valenciennes's treatise on painting outdoors, Éléments de perspective pratique (published in 1800), was to influence many artists, including Corot. It would seem that Denis, in his studies of Roman rooftops, rocks and skies, was also following Valenciennes’s advice.

Denis's oil studies are often of dramatic scenes from nature, particularly the spectacle of the sun setting behind stormy clouds, which allowed him to show various intense light effects. In this sketch, a thin strip of grey-green land at the bottom of the picture, which is otherwise filled by the expansive sky, anchors the composition and gives it scale -- a device also used by Valenciennes. In the distance, some dark grey-brown buildings, possibly ruins, are silhouetted against the horizon. Their function, perhaps, is also to give a sense of scale and provide a focal point to the setting sun, which is hidden by a purple-grey cloud. Although the sun itself cannot be seen directly, shafts of pale yellow and pink sunlight radiate from behind the cloud.

The entire sketch has been rapidly painted -- most likely in under an hour -- and Denis adjusts the handling of the paint according to the area he is working on The paint itself ranges from just a thin coating -- for example  the initial ground colour which you can still see in places -- to the thick impasto cream and yellow paint used to highlight the upper edges of the clouds in the picture’s centre, which evoke the brilliance of the sunlight behind them. The grey clouds have a textured appearance, as if the paint has been stippled on, using the end of the brush, rather than brushed on smoothly. The sky and the sun’s rays, however, are painted with long fluid strokes. These shafts of sunlight vary from quite thickly painted strokes of yellow and pink to more delicate strokes used for the vertical rays directly above the cloud. To the right, Denis has painted a broad ray, which cuts diagonally across the grey clouds, using just a single unbroken upward stroke of a wide brush.

Style: Neoclassical, Barbizon