wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
The two women in this portrait, Dorothy and Elizabeth, were the eldest surviving daughters of Thomas, 1st Viscount Savage. It was once thought that the picture was painted around the time of Dorothy’s scandalous elopement in 1637, and that she was the sister seated on the right, receiving the roses that were an attribute of her namesake, Saint Dorothy.

At this time there was strong anti-Catholic feeling in England, and a contemporary account states that ‘Lord Andover had been married to Lady Dorothy Savage by a Catholic priest without the knowledge of their parents, that his father and mother were consequently "in great affliction" and that Lady Savage "pretends a great displeasure"'. It was even rumoured that Dorothy had converted to Catholicism. Elizabeth was included in the gossip as she had also been married by a Catholic priest, to Lord Thimbleby. But it was in fact the Savage family who were Catholic and Lord Andover, a Protestant, who had married without his parents’ permission.

This theory and the attendant rumours have now been disproved. A contemporary copy of the painting has descended through the Savage family, bearing inscriptions that identify Dorothy as the sister standing on the left. Elizabeth wears a saffron-coloured gown -- at the time, it was believed that this was the colour worn by brides in ancient Greece. Elizabeth is the newly-wed receiving roses from Cupid, the god of erotic love, and the flowers become a symbol of love and not that of a saint.

Anthony van Dyck was largely responsible for introducing the double or ‘friendship’ portrait to Britain, and this picture is likely to have been entirely by his hand without studio assistants. The informal composition and quantities of shimmering silk perfectly illustrate the appeal of Van Dyck’s new style to aristocratic British patrons eager for innovation. The wide, deep necklines of their dresses reveal the smooth skin of each woman's décolletage, and their necks are encircled with pearls. The strong colour of Elizabeth’s gown is softened by the deep warm brown of her shawl. Dorothy adjusts her own shawl over her shoulder, revealing a long gold chain over her arm and across her body. Both women have their hair dressed in the height of fashion, with ringlets and corkscrew curls over the forehead and brushing their cheeks. There is a strong family likeness: both women have large brown eyes and long faces with full, pink cheeks and rounded chins.

But the faces of the sisters hardly bear witness to a celebration of wedded harmony. Both appear disengaged and distant, if not outright unhappy; Elizabeth’s hand holding the rose almost seems to crush it. The background too, seems unpromising, with heavy, grey clouds overshadowing a garden revealed by a dark green curtain that is drawn back awkwardly, displaying inelegant, angular folds.

Style: Baroque, Stuart
This painting was the right half of a decorative panel commissioned by Jean Schopfer, a writer who published under the pen name Claude Anet. In 1935, over 30 years after its completion, Vuillard cut the panel into two and reworked it; the other half, La Terrasse at Vasouy, the Garden, is also in the National Gallery’s collection.

Many members of this elegant group were part of the literary and artistic scene in Paris. From left to right are the artist Pierre Bonnard, Madame Alice Schopfer and Monsieur Jean Schopfer, the novelist Romain Coolus, Misia Natanson, Lucy Hessel, Madame 'Bob' Schopfer and Monsieur Louis Schopfer and the writer Tristan Bernard.

Lucy Hessel, who was married to Vuillard's patron Jos Hessel, was the host of this gathering in 1901. She wasn’t originally in the picture -- Vuillard added her and her collie dog Basto when he reworked the painting. She replaced the earlier figures of Léon and Lise Blum.

Style: Nabi
A country track leads from the left foreground between two outcrops of tree-covered rocks, around a limpid pool and towards the distant mountains. In the foreground a man wearing a classical tunic rests by the side of the track. He looks towards a second man in the middle distance, who ties his sandal. In the background, a third man walks along the track beside the water.

This is one of Poussin's earliest landscapes, painted in the late 1630s. Unlike many of his works, the picture does not seem to have a literary or religious source. Poussin based this scene on the countryside around Rome where he is known to have drawn landscape studies, but at this stage in his career he had limited experience of landscape painting. Here, he tentatively created an ideal landscape by building up contrasting areas of dark and light and by highlighting these areas with the three figures. Trees and rocky cliffs frame the scene and lead our eye into the distance. The foliage is incredibly detailed and in places individual leaves are visible and picked out by the sunlight.

This picture -- like another of Poussin's landscapes in our collection, Landscape with a Man scooping Water from a Stream -- was probably painted for the artist's friend and patron Cassiano dal Pozzo, or for Cassiano's younger brother, Carlo Antonio. Although the paintings have always been together in the same collections, and both show three figures in a landscape, they were probably not made as pendants to be hung together, and may have been painted a year or two apart.

Style: Baroque, Academic
This painting is part of Romanino's high altarpiece for S. Alessandro in Brescia. It is situated to the right of the main panel of the Nativity and shows the theologian, priest and historian, Saint Jerome, who lived in Constantinople and Rome. As secretary to Pope Damasus I, Jerome made the first translation of the Bible in Latin.

Saint Jerome is depicted holding a crucifix and beating his chest with a stone -- some blood may be detected on it -- in penance for his sinful thoughts. The Cross is formed from rough sticks, but the body of Christ is flesh coloured and spots of blood can be seen on the hands, hair, feet and side. The figure of Jerome fills almost the entire panel; the painting is cropped so tightly that Jerome's right heel and the knuckles of his right hand are missing. The restricted space gives the figure a monumental power.

Penitent Jerome is usually shown kneeling and gazing at a crucifix. Here he stands to match Saint Alexander who is depicted on the panel to the other side of the Nativity. Saint Jerome's knees are slightly bent as though acknowledging the infant Christ in the central panel. However, the perspective of his feet is not quite right -- his right leg appears longer and nearer to us than his foremost one.

The lion at Jerome’s feet is one of his attributes and refers to the legend that he befriended a lion while living in the desert as a hermit. The lion’s strange appearance suggests that Romanino had probably never seen a real one. Saint Jerome's other attribute, a red cardinal's hat, is not included.

There is no reason obvious to us today for why Saint Jerome was chosen for this altarpiece. The three other saints represented -- Alexander, Filippo Benizzi and Gaudioso -- were all of local relevance to Brescia and to the church of S. Alessandro. One of the 12 altars in the church was dedicated to Saint Jerome, but that does not explain his presence in this altarpiece. Saint Jerome must have had some special significance of which we are now unaware. It may only be a coincidence but Romanino's own name was Girolamo, the Italian for Jerome.

Style: High Renaissance
This panel is part of a group of images that formed the predella of an altarpiece made by Fra Angelico for the church of San Domenico, Fiesole, near Florence. Its saints look towards the central panel and to Christ, who appears on it, resurrected from the dead.

The Virgin Mary kneels at the top right, a blue cloak over her head and a star at her shoulder. She holds her hands together in devotion before Christ, her son. Behind her two groups of saints also kneel. Next to her we see Saint Peter, carrying a book and the keys to the kingdom of heaven, promised to him by Jesus. The bearded figure behind him is Saint Paul. He carries a sword -- a reminder that he was beheaded for his faith. Its blade once shone silver but the silver leaf has tarnished and blackened.

In the front group, the figures carrying pens (and some with books) are probably supposed to represent the Four Evangelists who wrote the Gospels. Curiously, given that most of the inscriptions in these panels are legible, the saint beneath the Virgin Mary holds out a book with writing represented by scribbles. The others might be disciples, and the figure in the pink and yellow cloak in the centre of the middle row may be Saint Barnabas, the patron saint of the altarpiece's donor, Barnaba degli Agli. The saint also appears on the panel's main tier, which is still in San Domenico in Fiesole.

Behind this group is another gathering of saints. Their clothes reflect their occupations and status, and they carry objects associated with events in their lives -- or the instruments of their death. In the top row, wearing the black and white habit of the Dominican Order is Saint Dominic, its founder. He carries a lily, his usual symbol. In the same row are several bishop saints, identified by their hats, called mitres. One, in a blue cope decorated with gold fleur-de-lis, carries three golden balls on a red book. This is Saint Nicholas of Bari, and the balls represent the bags of gold that, according to his legend, he secretly donated to three poor sisters, throwing them through the women's open window at night.

At the head of the middle row is Saint Jerome, who lived in the fourth century. Jerome, as here, was often depicted in the outfit of a cardinal -- including the red hat -- even though the role of cardinal did not exist in his lifetime; it was an indication of his status in the Church as an advisor to Pope Damasus I. He carries a pen and an open book. The legible inscription bears the name Eustochium, the saint to whom he wrote letters.

The front row is dominated by saints from religious orders: Carmelite monks (the order was founded on Mount Carmel, in the Holy Land) dressed in white, with others in brown habits, possibly Hieronymites (an Augustinian order of hermits inspired by Saint Jerome). The monks are tonsured -- their hair is shaved, leaving only a ring of hair around the edges -- a sign of religious devotion. The ageing man with long grey hair and beard is Saint Paul, the First Hermit. His extraordinary dress is not fabric but a textile made from woven palm leaves.

Style: Gothic, Early Renaissance
We don't know who this little girl was, but she was clearly the daughter of very rich parents. She wears a black, gold and white cap decorated with black beads, real and artificial flowers and tassels, as well as an ornament on her right ear. Her collar seems to be lace and her dark blue dress is perhaps decorated with strips of gold and silver lace.

She has gold chains around her waist, wrists and neck, one with a coral pendant. Her little wicker basket contains cherries, a fruit often associated with the Christ Child, perhaps because they were the colour of blood, as was red coral, which was believed to protect children from evil.

The style is close to portriats of children by Marten de Vos, but less competently painted: the hands are out of scale and badly drawn. The painter was a follower of Marten, possibly working in Antwerp around 1575--80, the likely date of this picture.

Style: High Renaissance, Mannerist
Corot left Paris in April 1871 to escape the Commune, a revolutionary government which had taken power in March following France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian war. In May he stayed with his friend and fellow artist Alfred Robaut at Douai. Robaut spent a number of years compiling a catalogue of Corot’s work, which was published in 1905. In the entry for this painting he noted that Corot had copied one of his own studies: ‘This painting was executed by Corot in a few hours during his stay in Douai, after a study by M. Alfred Robaut. He copied it faithfully in almost all its parts, confining himself to adding the small house which emerges from the trees on the right.’

The area where Corot worked that spring and summer is particularly noted for the marshes lying along the Scarpe and Sensée rivers, which can also be seen in Corot's  The Marsh at Arleux. The village of Palluel lies directly south of Arleux-du-Nord in the valley of the Sensée. The expanse of water in the background of this view may be the river itself. The inlet in the foreground would be one of the many which run along its course. At the right is the steep roof of the house that Corot added to his copy from Robaut, next to which stands a derelict building, with the beams of the roof visible. In the foreground a man sits in a flat-bottomed boat or punt, which is piled high with what are probably reeds.  It is a marshy, watery landscape, where land and water have the same muted silvery tonality. The whole is very thinly painted, with the weave of the canvas visible throughout. As was his usual practice, Corot painted the sky at a late stage, bringing it round the roof of the house, where it overlaps the chimney.

Style: Barbizon
This is the interior of a brothel. On the left, three men drink with the women who work there, whose skirts are hoisted up to show their legs. On the right we see a group of entertainers: a boy is doing a headstand on a stool, a small dog has perhaps already jumped through the metal hoop on the floor. An unkempt man with bagpipes has been accompanying the tricks. One woman hands a glass of wine to another, who also holds the dog's lead. In the background a man embraces another woman with one arm and raises a flagon in the air with the other, while in the top left corner a couple are closing the door of a bedroom behind them.

Pictures of inns and brothels were increasingly in demand in the sixteenth century, and at least five brothel scenes are attributed to the Brunswick Monogrammist. He did two versions of this composition, with different details in the background. Our painting is an enlarged version of a panel in the Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht; a variant can be seen in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp. The original compositions were probably invented by the Brunswick Monogrammist and repeated with small variations by his followers.

Style: High Renaissance
Andrea Gritti (1455--1538) was elected doge of Venice in 1523 and this painting was probably made soon afterwards. He wears his robes of office: a golden cap, known as a corno,  and a golden silk damask robe with a red lining. The linen head cloth, called a rensa, under the corno should have a string hanging down to tie it under the chin. It probably once had one but the portrait, particularly around the face, neck and beard, is damaged and has been extensively repainted.  On his left hand, Gritti wears a gold ring with a device representing the doge kneeling before Saint Mark, patron saint of Venice. His right hand points downwards in a gesture that is unusual in a portrait. The dark frame painted around the grey background emphasises the portrait's formal, constructed nature.

Gritti was born near Verona and spent the early years of his career as a grain merchant in Constantinople. In 1499 he was imprisoned on charges of espionage but escaped death due to his friendship with the Vizier. In 1510 Gritti took command of Venice's army, and after his election as doge he signed a treaty with Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, ending Venice's active involvement in the Italian Wars.

This portrait by Catena conveys Gritti's power and authority. His face is represented almost in profile against the plain dark background -- like the profile of a ruler on a medal. Indeed his identity can be confirmed by comparison with portrait medals of him.  He appears to be looking towards someone outside the picture and then gesturing down to us. The portrait may have originally hung near a religious image, perhaps of Christ or the Virgin and Child, for the doge's attitude is one of dignified adoration. Gritti may have been appealing to Christ or the Virgin on our behalf.  Alternatively, his pointing hand may represent a rhetorical gesture, reminding us of his powers as a politician and his ability to resolve complicated diplomatic issues.

In 1531 Titian painted a votive picture (a picture given in thanks) of Doge Andrea Gritti kneeling before the Virgin and Child  for the Sala del Collegio of the Doge's Palace -- the room where foreign diplomats were received. Titian's work was destroyed in 1574 in a fire. We know that this portrait is not a remnant of that picture, since the pose of the doge (recorded in an anonymous woodcut) was entirely different. However, when Tintoretto and his assistants painted a replacement picture for the Doge's Palace they seem to have copied Catena's portrait, since the figure of the doge is virtually identical in their composition.

Catena dwells on details of fabric and embroidery. He creates an impression of Gritti's strength but continues the tradition of psychological distance and reserve of earlier portraits of doges, such as Giovanni Bellini's Portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan. By contrast, Titian's posthumous portrait of Doge Andrea Gritti (National Gallery of Art, Washington) of about 1545, with its rapid, energetic brushwork and commanding frontal pose, captures the leader's fiery, indomitable nature.

Style: High Renaissance
A young woman in armour, her horse tied to a tree behind her, has wandered into a kind of rustic concert. A  shepherd and his family are sitting outside their cottage -- you can see the thatch of the roof in the top left corner and their sheep are in a pen in the middle of the  picture. The elderly father is weaving baskets out of reeds while his sons hold musical instruments.

This pastoral idyll is a scene from an epic poem, Jerusalem Delivered, published in 1581 by Torquato Tasso, the greatest Italian poet of the late Renaissance. It is a highly imaginative account of the First Crusade, with a number of romantic subplots. This picture relates to the tale of the Muslim princess Erminia, daughter of the defeated king of Antioch, who has fallen in love with a Christian knight called Tancred. Believing him wounded, she disguises herself as a soldier and sets out to find him. A series of adventures ensues, and at one point Erminia comes across an old shepherd and his sons. At first they are alarmed at the sight of such a warlike figure, but Erminia takes off her armour and tells them her story. The shepherd convinces her of the delights of rural poverty as opposed to the glories of war, and Erminia shares the bucolic life of him and his family.

We are not sure exactly who painted this picture, but it has stylistic similarities with the work of both Annibale Carracci and Domenichino. It was once attributed to Domenichino, who treated the same subject -- though quite differently -- in a painting now in the Musée du Louvre, Paris. The picture's vaguely classicising manner also seems to reflect Annibale's later work. It was presumably painted by one of the many artists trained in the academy run by the Carracci family in Bologna, and has recently been attributed to the Bolognese painter Franceso Albani (1578--1660), who perhaps made it when he was in Rome in 1609--10.

Style: Baroque, Academic
Bartholomeus Breenbergh was an artist blessed with a vivid imagination and great skills in the painting of Antique monuments. He shows us an Old Testament story taking place in a completely imaginary Egypt, with luxuriant European foliage under a grey Northern sky and includes as many exquisitely detailed portrayals of antiquities as he can: obelisks, a column, a pyramid, and a stela (a carved commemorative stone slab). Not all these ancient objects are Egyptian but Breenbergh crowds them into the picture regardless, in order to convey that the story he tells is set in ancient times.

The painting shows the story of Moses. The children of Israel were captive in Egypt, and Pharaoh decreed that all their male children should be killed in case they grew up to fight the Egyptians and depose him. Moses's mother laid her baby in a rush basket and hid him among the reeds by the banks of the River Nile, leaving his sister Miriam to stand watch (Exodus 2: 1-6). The baby was found by Pharaoh's daughter who wanted to keep him, but needed a wet nurse to feed and care for him. Miriam volunteered to find one, reuniting the baby with his mother. Moses grew up to lead the Israelites to their Promised Land.

In the tradition of European painting of the time, Breenbergh painted Pharaoh's daughter as a wealthy European woman, in a robe of satin and fur that combines European and imaginary biblical clothes. She is covered in jewels and has a long train, held by a little Black girl. She shields her pale complexion against the sun under a round parasol. Miriam, much less finely dressed, points to the empty basket; her mother, holding the swaddled baby Moses, is bundled up in peasant's clothes and hat.

In the painting, the story of the finding of Moses is placed in the foreground, yet it is almost incidental to the landscape. In line with the traditional method of conveying depth, darker, clearer colours appear at the base of the canvas; mid-tones, mainly of greens, in the centre; and blue-greys at the top with less distinct painting of specific objects. It takes a moment or two to make out the tall mountain because it's so pale and blurred, almost blending into the sky -- making it seem many miles away.

The painting of the antiquities is superb, however incongruous they may seem. Breenbergh will have taken them from etchings widely available in the Netherlands at the time. The central column works especially well -- the sun glinting on the speckled, polished stone at the edge of the chasm down to the river. The pyramid too is convincing, picked out in the light, weather-beaten and ancient, the point on its silver globe reaching up towards the forest and the ruined castle towering overhead.

But perhaps the most appealing details are the two camels plodding across the perilous viaduct among the slow-moving flock of sheep and the two men with an elephant on the river bank in the sunshine.

Style: Baroque