wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
If it weren’t for the inscription on the balustrade you might not realise that this is a portrait of a queen. This lettering was actually added to the picture at a later date; the sitter’s contemporaries would have gauged her status and nobility from the portrait's dimensions (near life-size) and her sumptuous lace and silks.

They would have also realised that she was in mourning, a state suggested by her black dress and confirmed by the black ribbon on her right arm. Her jewellery is astonishingly impressive: a combination of enormous pearls and black precious stones. The earrings had been given to her by her husband, who had died ten years previously. He was Frederick V, Elector Palatine, and she is Elizabeth Stuart, the daughter of James I of England.

She moved to Heidelberg with Frederick when they married in 1613. He was elected King of Bohemia in November 1619 and they then moved to Prague. But the following November he was defeated by a rival claimant, the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand II. Frederick and Elizabeth went into exile in Holland and Elizabeth became known as the 'Winter Queen' (her brief reign began and ended in that season).

This picture was made in 1642, when Elizabeth was 46 years old. In the same year, civil war broke out in England -- it would eventually lead to the execution of her brother Charles I -- and her sister-in-law Queen Henrietta Maria crossed the Channel to join her in exile in The Hague. Elizabeth eventually returned to England in 1661 after the restoration of her nephew, Charles II. But she died just nine months after her return.

Gerrit van Honthorst had an international reputation for attracting high-status clients. After working in Rome, he was invited to England in 1628 by Charles I and painted several royal portraits before returning to live mainly in The Hague as painter to the Stadholder. He was also one of the artists most favoured by Elizabeth Stuart and he made numerous portraits of Frederick, Elizabeth and their children.

This full-length, near life-size example represents a new type of formal picture of Elizabeth. It shows her with a new hairstyle -- the first time she had appeared without a fringe -- and it was also the first time she had been depicted in the open air. The outdoor setting creates a certain grandeur, with the landscape and winding river receding into the far distance. The rosebush and what seems to be an oak tree frame her head and shoulders, and the stone balustrade and chequerboard pavement create a sort of platform in the foreground which gives the impression that she is sharing the same space as the viewer. The dog may be a symbol of fidelity as well as a portrait of a favourite pet.

The National Gallery also owns portraits of two of Elizabeth's sons -- Prince Charles Louis, Count Palatine and Prince Rupert, Count Palatine, both from the studio of Anthony van Dyck -- which usually hang on either side of this painting.

Style: Caravaggist, Stuart
Christ hangs on the Cross, emaciated, blood dripping from the wounds in his hands, feet and side. His head is slumped in death, his face pale. His followers sit on the ground around him, inconsolable. Mary Magdalene, dressed in her traditional red and with long fair hair, kneels in prayer next to the Cross. Christ's mother, the Virgin Mary, collapses in grief, supported by two other female saints. These are presumably Mary Salome and Mary Cleophas who, according to the various biblical accounts, were present at the Crucifixion. On the other side, Saint John, Christ's favourite disciple, rests his head sadly on his hand. We are not sure who the older woman on the right is meant to be -- perhaps Saint Anne, the Virgin's mother -- but her scalloped polygonal halo is unusual.

This panel once formed the pinnacle of a large retablo or polyptych made for the small church of Saint Martin at Riglos, north-eastern Spain. Until recently the painting was attributed to the anonymous Master of Riglos, named after the altarpiece, but its style comes close to works by Pere García de Benavarri. García is thought to have trained with Blasco de Grañén (documented 1422–1459), the author of the main panel of the Riglos altarpiece showing Saint Martin giving his cloak to a beggar (today in the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona). Other small panels illustrating episodes from Saint Martin’s life are in various collections.

Spanish polyptychs at this date often took the form of a large central panel, showing the saint to whom the church was dedicated, surrounded by smaller panels and topped with an image of the Crucifixion. They often had very elaborate gilded frames.

The artist has had to adapt the composition to fit the horizontal format of the panel. Christ is surprisingly small in comparison to the other figures, and he is rather squashed under the gilded moulding, which comes down over the Cross, his halo and his hands. The scroll pinned to the top of the Cross -- it reads 'INRI', which stands for 'Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews' -- peeps out from the Gothic tracery. At the top of the painting, above the curving gold tracery, is a dark blue sky with golden stars; in his Gospel, Matthew writes that the midday sky went dark for three hours during the Crucifixion.

The whole scene is set in a barren mountainous landscape, presumably meant to represent Golgotha, the hill where Christ was crucified. Instead of sky there is a burnished gold background, decorated with a scrolling pattern: the gold background has been stamped with a metal tool to produce a three-dimensional effect. Such backgrounds were traditional in Spanish medieval painting -- look at Bermejo's Saint Michael triumphant over the Devil with the Donor Antoni Joan -- and must have flickered and shone in the candlelight of a medieval church. The picture is painted on pine, the material traditionally used for Spanish panels as it was much more widely available than the oak used by north European painters.

Style: Gothic, Early Renaissance
Turbulent grey clouds roll across the sky. The lake beneath it is calm, but a storm threatens. It’s evening, and a tiny sailing boat in the distance is little more than a smudge on the horizon against the vivid orange and gold of the dying sun. Soft red reflections streak the surface of the water. Far to the right, at the tip of the promontory, a sail catches the sun’s colours as a boat slips homewards for shelter. Further along towards the mainland a tall spire gleams white against the deep grey shadows of the hills.

The water ripples in towards the shore, lapping around the pale rocks on the strip of sand to the right. Close to us, bigger, darker rocks topped with green seaweed face the waves that will come if the wind rises. A little way out a woman stoops to collect freshwater shellfish, her enormous basket hooked over her back. Her red coat echoes the red of Courbet’s firm, bold signature in the bottom right corner of the painting.

On 23 July 1873 Courbet fled France for Switzerland. As President of the Arts Commission during the short-lived Commune that followed the 1871 revolution, he was held responsible for the cost of replacing the Vendôme Column, which had been destroyed. He settled at La-Tour-de Peilz on the shores of Lac Léman (Lake Geneva), where he bought an old inn in the town, Bon-Port, and received his permit of residence. He had managed to bring many of his pictures with him and held a successful exhibition in his new home.

Courbet painted several views of the lake from the terrace of Bon-Port, many at sunset. They were even more dramatic than this one, but the sky was again the main subject of the paintings. Some years earlier, from 1859 to 1869, he had visited the coast of Normandy where he produced a series of seascapes that were also focused on the sky and full of light. He seems to have painted the Lac Léman pictures with the rolling skies and jagged, weed-strewn rocks of Normandy still fresh in his in mind.

During his exile, the French state seized Courbet's property and put his friends and family under surveillance. The country was politically unstable and the artist refused to return to Paris until a general amnesty had been declared. It did not happen. He had been welcomed in Switzerland, but even so, he fell into decline and painted less and less well. He died on 31 December 1877 at Bon-Port, a few days after the contents of his Paris studio had been sold at a public auction in his absence. The man who had taken Paris by storm -- of whom it was written, 'It was as if a whirlwind had roared through the gallery rattling the windows and shattering the glass' -- died almost penniless and in exile.

Style: Barbizon
We are looking into a refined room, its wall adorned with paintings in gilded frames and its door obscured by a heavy green curtain. A man in a black robe and white wig, perhaps a Venetian nobleman, bows to a young girl, whose elegant white dress stands out against the vivid green patterned damask. He is about to kiss her hand.

Pietro Longhi has given this scene a sense of intrigue with the male servant who waits patiently to serve a drink and the woman who lingers beside the girl -- perhaps her mother. She holds an offering of a pink flower, perhaps symbolising the girl's beauty or purity.

During the 1730s and 1740s Longhi specialised in capturing the lives and customs of wealthy Venetians, as in A Lady Receiving a Cavalier and An Interior with Three Women and a Seated Man, and often included amorous or comical undertones.

Style: Baroque, Rococo
A young milkmaid with pink cheeks leads her herd of cattle away for milking, a brass pitcher on her head and a bucket in her hand. The rising sun reflects in a pool and reaches through the trees to catch the sleek white hides of some of the cows. It’s an idyllic, rustic scene, but there is energy: people are working and animals moving. Apart from the milkmaid, a youth sits astride one of his horses as they drink in the stream while a man with a pole struggles to release an obstinate animal from the muddy grass on its bank.

Rubens has filled the picture with minute detail, from the many different kinds of foliage to the tiny scarlet flowers on a branch hanging from the cliff. Almost hidden in the undergrowth, two black goats forage for food and two magpies perch in the branches of the central trees. The surrounding landscape is almost shielded from view by the towering cliffs. This follows the Flemish landscape tradition that stems from the paintings of Joachim Patinir, such as Saint Jerome in a Rocky Landscape, painted about a century before Rubens's picture. But here Rubens has added a dense forest with trees massed together, their branches interwoven and their exposed roots gnarled, with light filtering through the poplar trees in the distance and focusing on the busy figures in the foreground.

A little to the left of the animals by the water, a flock of sheep grazes on a rocky outcrop at the foot of the cliffs. This section of the painting is a free copy of the central part of Rubens’s A Shepherd with his Flock in a Woody Landscape. The two pictures were painted at about the same time, both on oak panels, and this replication is unique in Rubens’s work. An X-ray image has revealed that the shepherd boy in a red jacket in the other painting once also appeared in 'The Watering Place', in exactly the same pose, but it is thought that Rubens painted him out, possibly because he distracted from the group of figures and animals below.

In seventeenth-century Flanders, landscape began to be accepted as a genre of its own instead of as a mere background for narrative paintings or portraits. For Rubens in particular it became a way of celebrating the Flemish countryside he loved. But in England, landscape painting was still neglected, even into the eighteenth century, until artists such as Richard Wilson and Thomas Gainsborough turned their attention to it. The latter saw The Watering Place in London in 1768 and painted a landscape inspired by it in homage to Rubens.

Style: Baroque
This panel comes from the predella of Ugolino's altarpiece for the church of Santa Croce in Florence. The predella ran along the bottom of the entire altarpiece and was, as was usual, originally painted on one horizontal panel. It was then cut into individual scenes. There are three others in our collection: The Betrayal of Christ, The Way to Calvary and The Resurrection.

The dead Christ is being removed from the Cross, and Saint John the Evangelist clutches him mournfully. One man pulls the nails from his feet; blood from his wounds has pooled on the ground below. This may be Nicodemus, a Pharisee who is mentioned in the Gospel of John as having come to the Cross with spices to anoint Christ's body. Joseph, a man from the town of Arimathea, appears in both Luke's and John's Gospels; according to Luke, he removed the body from the Cross alone. It is likely, then, that the man on the ladder is Joseph of Arimathea.

Christ's limp body collapses as he is gradually freed from the Cross, and he is caught by his mother, the Virgin Mary. She embraces him, placing her face against his in a tender gesture that reminds the viewer of their relationship. The Virgin is accompanied by three other women. Mary Magdalene caresses Christ's hand, pressing it against her cheek. A woman in green behind is only barely visible. Technical analysis has shown that her head -- which can be seen between the haloes of Mary Magdalene and Christ -- is painted over the gilded background. This implies that she was added at a late stage of the painting process, over the gilding: usually the artist would reserve a space for the painted figures so as not to waste precious gold leaf. The place where Jesus was crucified was known as Golgotha ('the place of the skull'). The absence of trees and the arid, craggy rocks seem a fitting landscape for a place with such a bleak name.

Here, and in the other predella panels, Ugolino used panels from an altarpiece known as the Maestà, made by his Sienese predecessor  Duccio, as a model for the composition -- though he includes fewer figures. Here he has omitted two of the women who appear in Duccio's depiction of this subject.

Style: Gothic, Early Renaissance
Saint Paul, who is dressed in a red cloak, directs the men in the foreground to burn a pile of books that represent the pagan tradition. He looks towards a man on the left whose outstretched arms also encourage this act. Paul had travelled to the city of Ephesus (now part of Turkey) to encourage the Jews and Greeks to convert to Christianity, and his success is shown by figures praying and confessing to other disciples; on the right one gives alms in the form of money to a kneeling lady. This episode is taken from the Acts of the Apostles, written by Saint Luke, a disciple who accompanied Paul on his missionary journeys. Luke may be the male figure with a ledger.

This is a preliminary sketch for a much larger version of this subject, now in the Louvre, Paris. The temple on the right presumably represents the great temple of Diana in Ephesus, now destroyed. The building's connection with Diana is only made clear in the larger painting, where a statue of the goddess is visible in the background. In the larger version, the artist made significant changes to the background, arrangement of figures and their gestures. The figures convey a greater sense of movement and emotion, and Paul holds a book under one arm, his forefinger pointing upwards to symbolise his devotion to the spiritual world. The pose was inspired by the figure of Plato in Raphael's The School of Athens in the Vatican, Rome.

The larger painting was given to the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris, one of the city's principal religious landmarks, by the confraternity of Saint-Anne and Saint-Marcel of the Paris goldsmiths' guild in 1649. Every year the goldsmiths commissioned a painting measuring four metres high, which was initially placed at the entrance of the building, where it could be seen by those passing by. The picture was then taken to the altar of the Virgin Mary and eventually displayed on the cathedral wall. This tradition lasted from 1630 to 1707, after which financial difficulties brought it to an end. Le Sueur would have used the preliminary sketch to show his patrons what the full-size picture would look like, as he was competing against other painters for the commission. He also produced smaller versions of the final design for the confraternity's leaders.

Style: Baroque, Academic
In a remote landscape, the Virgin, dressed in modest robes, holds the infant Christ and offers him milk. The baby turns away from her breast and smiles at us, his palm resting on the back of his mother’s hand. As in Boltraffio's The Virgin and Child, the infant Christ pauses from suckling to acknowledge the worshipping viewer.

Images of the Virgin breastfeeding are known as 'Virgo Lactans' (or Madonna del Latte in Italian), and became popular during the Middle Ages as part of the increasing cult of and devotion to the Virgin Mary. The nursing Virgin is often shown seated humbly on the ground, as the ‘Madonna of Humility’, because during the Middle Ages women of any means usually did not breastfeed their own babies, but employed wet nurses to feed them. The Virgin’s milk was regarded as a sign of her own devotion and sacrifice, symbolically connected to the blood of Christ.

Paintings of the Virgin breastfeeding became particularly popular in Tuscany from the fourteenth century onward and it is likely that this painting was made in the region in the first decades of the sixteenth century. The so-called Madonna Litta, historically attributed to Leonardo, but surely a studio work overseen by him and painted between 1491 and 1495 (now in the Hermitage, St Petersburg), was a particularly celebrated composition which influenced the many versions, such as Boltraffio's, that appeared in the years following its creation. After the Council of Trent, held between 1545 and 1563, which sought to reform the Catholic Church in response to the Protestant Reformation, nudity in religious art was discouraged and such images of the Virgin were less frequently commissioned.

The picture is badly disfigured by old varnish, which has darkened, yellowing the flesh tones and making it hard to distinguish the painting’s true colours. The lighter strip at the top of the panel, through which the Virgin’s halo passes, is an unusual element probably relating to how the painting was previously framed, but the precise reason for its existence is not known. We are not certain that this painting is by Sodoma but another version (Richter Collection, London), similar in design, is attributed to him.

Style: High Renaissance
This painting by Davide Ghirlandaio, brother of the more famous Domenico, must date from the 1490s. The surface is badly worn in parts, especially in the face of Saint John.

Underdrawing is now partly visible and reveals that the artist first planned to depict the Virgin's right hand on Christ's right leg. 

The buildings in the distance are based on notable monuments in Rome and include the Pantheon, the Colosseum, and the Arch of Constantine.

Style: Early Renaissance
A bearded saint stands on a marble parapet against a shimmering gold background. This is Saint Bartholomew, one of the Twelve Apostles. After Christ's death, they became missionaries and established Christian churches in Europe and further afield.

The picture was once part of a triptych that was probably painted by Bartolomeo Caporali -- it is very close in style to an altarpiece that we know Caporali made, now in Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria, Perugia. Other panels from the triptych are also in our collection.

Nothing is known for certain about Bartholomew's life. In the Middle Ages he was believed to have gone to India and Armenia and then been skinned alive at Derbend, on the Caspian Sea. The knife he holds here is the flaying knife, his attribute and the instrument of his martyrdom. By association he became the patron saint of tanners and all who work with skins.

Bartholomew stands firmly, gazing out at us, his richly coloured robe wrapped around him in deep sculptural folds. His bent knee and turned out feet give him a feeling of solidity, as does the shadow he casts on the marble behind him -- features we also find in the work of Caporali's contemporary Carlo Crivelli.

But -- again, as in Crivelli's work -- the illusion of reality is contrasted with the sparkling and intricately decorated burnished gold background. A gold leaf background like this is particularly characteristic of Italian fourteenth- and fifteenth-century paintings. The gold would have been beaten from coins and then laid over a gesso ground; patterns were punched and incised in it with handheld tools. Caporali was known for doing gilding work and for making coats of arms, banners and decorations for ceremonies, and was especially interested in decoration. The fine incised lines in the saint's halo and the extraordinarily elaborate curling foliage behind him would have caught the light in a dim medieval church. The foliage behind the saints is unusual in panel painting; it looks very like the kind of decoration that was popular in the borders of Florentine manuscripts.

The panel has lost its original frame, though you can see traces of the beginning of an arch at the top where the frame sat. It has been cut down too, so it is shorter than it once was.

Style: Early Renaissance
This is the right wing of a triptych showing episodes from the Passion that was made for a convent near Delft in around 1510. In it we see the Deposition -- Christ being taken down from the Cross. The ensuing episode of the Crucifixion is shown on the central panel, while on the left Christ is led out after his trial.

The setting for this scene is rather different than in the two other panels. The man supporting the upper part of Christ's body is probably Joseph of Arimathea; the man supporting his feet and who wears a fringed tunic, a cap and a hood, may be Nicodemus, a Pharisee. The woman with them is apparently Mary Magdalene and is in any case the same woman who kneels at the foot of the cross in the centre panel.

Saint John and the Virgin appear in the foreground, surrounded by four women. If they are the same women who surrounded the Virgin in the foreground of the centre panel, they are wearing different clothes. The older woman on our right carries a small jar, the significance of which has not been explained.

On the back of the panel, Saints Peter and Mary Magdalene are painted in grisaille to look like stone statues in a shared niche. They would have been visible when the shutters were closed. This way of showing saints on the outside of wings was very popular in early Netherlandish art, appearing for example on Memling's Saint John the Baptist and Saint John the Evangelist.

Style: High Renaissance