wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
Two young women lie by a river. Traditionally, such a scene would be set in an idyllic landscape, with the women as impossibly perfect ideals of youth and beauty, often in the guise of classical nudes – goddesses of Greek mythology. But this pair caused a scandal when a larger version (now in the Musée du Petit Palais, Paris) appeared at the Paris Salon in 1857.

They appear below us but almost uncomfortably close, filling almost the whole of the frame and making the river and the sketchily painted tree almost incidental. Far from at ease, enjoying a peaceful moment in the countryside, these women are alert and aware. Courbet has made no attempt at flattery. One leans up on one elbow, almost squashing the large, colourful bouquet of flowers under the other. She is fashionably dressed and the hand holding her cheek wears a black lace mitten. Shiny coral beads circle her wrist. She looks back over her ballooning skirts, but although it’s a complacent gaze there is a feeling that she’s watching, and perhaps waiting.

The other woman sprawls out flat, her head on the dress she has taken off and bundled up like a pillow. A soft Indian shawl is spread over her hips and the stiff frills of her petticoats stick up like butterfly wings over her back. To the French bourgeois audience, the removal of the dress was shocking. This showing of the woman’s underwear, and such glamorous underwear too, was outrageous -- full nudity would probably have been considered less indecent. But perhaps even worse was her knowing, almost predatory look, faintly amused and blatantly erotic. To the Paris viewers, not only were the women from the city posed in an inappropriate Arcadian setting, there was little doubt as to their profession, and to have them so unashamedly displayed was totally unacceptable.

Courbet was vilified for his choice of subject. He had subverted the accepted portrayal of women in a natural setting: graceful, often fragile and although attractive, basically untouched. Instead, he made his modern women seem far from untouched. This was deemed as Realism at its offensive worst, and Courbet's reputation as a dangerous radical quickly grew.

The larger version of the painting exhibited at the Salon of 1857 is now in the Musée du Petit Palais, Paris. Courbet made a number of studies for that Salon painting, but it's not certain if this is one of them or a copy made later by an unknown artist. It would not appear to be in Courbet’s hand, though it still holds something of the shock of the original at first view. There are many opinions as to its origin but none but of them is satisfactory. Versions, studies, sketches and prints of the original painting exist in various galleries and private collections all over the world.

Style: Barbizon
Saint Sebastian was a third-century Roman centurion who was martyred for converting to Christianity. Following the direct orders of the Roman Emperor Diocletian, Sebastian's fellow soldiers tied him to a post and shot him with so many arrows that, according to the Golden Legend, his body looked like a porcupine. He miraculously survived, but was clubbed to death on the Emperor’s command.

The subject of Sebastian’s incredibly violent death was favoured by painters throughout Europe across centuries. Gerrit van Honthorst has shown the saint on the brink of death in this arresting close-up depiction. Four arrows pierce his partially naked body, which hangs lifelessly from what looks like an oak tree. The one that has stabbed through his leg points outward, and emphasises the painter’s signature in the lower left corner. Blood drips from this arrow’s tip in a steady stream, seemingly into our space.

Sebastian’s tormented body takes centre stage in Honthorst’s painting. The beautiful torso echoes classical sculpture, like the Belvedere Torso, which had been admired by artists in Rome since the fifteenth century. At the same time, the saint's physical suffering was intended to inspire devotion: viewers were prompted to imagine his intense pain and the strength of his faith.

The cult of Saint Sebastian was especially strong in Rome, where he was venerated as the city’s third patron saint after Peter and Paul. His remains were buried in the catacombs, at a spot now occupied by the Basilica of San Sebastiano fuori le Mura, a church dedicated to him. In the years that Honthorst spent in Rome, a number of ecclesiastical building projects dedicated to Sebastian were being planned or completed.

This picture was likely finished around 1623, three years after Honthorst had left Rome for his native Utrecht. There were a number of outbreaks of the plague in the city between 1624 and 1626, following renewed hostilities between the Dutch Republic and Spain that lead to food shortages and severe malnutrition in large parts of the population. From the seventh century onward, Sebastian was the most important saint to invoke for protection against the deadly disease. The Golden Legend recounts how, in that century, the Italian city of Pavia had been scourged by the plague until an altar dedicated to Sebastian had been erected and relics of the saint brought in.

Style: Caravaggist
This is the left wing of a triptych showing episodes from the Passion that was made for a convent near Delft in around 1510. It shows Christ about to set off on the road to Calvary, the site of his execution. The ensuing episode of the Crucifixion is shown on the central panel, while on the right Christ's body is taken down from the Cross (the Deposition).

We see Christ on the steps of the praetorium (hall), where his trial had taken place. He is being led away to be crucified. The Roman governor Pontius Pilate stands in the doorway behind Christ, while the Jewish high priests, who wanted him executed, look on from the windows. Christ has been crowned with thorns and his hands bound. The purple robe in which he was presented to the people during the trial has been taken from him, and he is wearing a blue tunic; this must be the seamless tunic mentioned in the Bible for which the Roman soldiers cast lots.

A motley crowd of soldiers preparing the Cross are watched by a weeping woman and her children. The artist was careful to emphasise differences in the spectators' reactions: the soldiers have exaggerated features and distorted expressions; one sticks his bottom in our faces as he leans over to lift up a pick from below the cross. In the background, the two criminals described as thieves who were executed alongside Christ have been stripped and bound. They wait to set off at the head the procession which reappears in the central panel.

The Master of Delft was an eclectic artist and a number of the figures in this painting are taken from the works of other painters. The child in the lower left-hand corner is like the child in  Lucas van Leyden's Flagellation of 1509, while the man bending over the Cross could be a free reversed copy of his Mocking of Christ, also dated 1509. The two thieves and the horseman preceding them through the gate are taken, directly or indirectly, from The Passion of Christ by Hans Memling, painted in about 1470 (Galleria Sabauda, Turin).

On the back of the panel are the Virgin and Child and Saint Augustine of Hippo, painted in grisaille to look like stone statues set in a shared niche. They would have been visible when the shutters were closed.

Style: High Renaissance
The apocryphal Book of Tobit describes how Tobit, a blind old man, sent his son Tobias to the distant city of Media to collect a debt. The boy was accompanied by the Archangel Raphael, protector of travellers. This painting depicts an important moment in Tobias's journey (Tobit 6: 2--9). While the boy was washing on the banks of the River Tigris, a fish tried to devour him. The angel told Tobias to grab it and remove its heart, liver and gall bladder, as they could be used for medicine (they would later restore Tobit's sight). Tobias, holding the weighty fish, struggles against the current, his red robe billowing behind him. He is watched by the angel and a little dog at the water's edge.

The figures are small and insubstantial compared to the grandeur of the landscape around them. Rosa liked to build up dark, heavy forms in the foreground of his paintings; here, a cliff face rises up on the right, its lower half in a deep shadow that is interrupted by the gleam of a small waterfall. Together with the windswept trees on the left, the outcrop creates a stage for the figures, though they are almost unnoticeable in the wilderness. Above, a flight of birds leads our gaze across the rocky gorge and towards open, mountainous landscape. There is no reassuring glimpse of any distant buildings and the clouds loom menacingly overhead.

Paintings like this one won Rosa a reputation among his patrons in Rome for outstanding landscapes that formed the backdrop to scenes of classical myth and to biblical events. His untamed landscapes are quite different from the gentle, atmospheric scenery of his contemporary, Claude. He didn't create a sense of the harmony of nature, as Claude did, but rather explored how violent and unpredictable its forces can be. This scene does, however, have echoes of Dughet's stormy landscapes, such as Landscape with Elijah and the Angel, which was painted in about 1663.

Landscape with Tobias and the Angel is probably a late work, painted during the early 1660s, around the same time as Landscape with Mercury and the Dishonest Woodman. Both compositions have two figures, one on land, the other in a river, placed in a setting that shows the restless movement of the wind, water and clouds. This scene, however, is freer and more spontaneous in style. Its subject must have appealed to Rosa, as he painted it many times; the National Gallery owns another version, probably the work of his studio. It was a well-known story in Italy in the seventeenth century, and there is also a version by Domenichino in the Gallery's collection: Landscape with Tobias laying hold of the Fish.

Landscape with Tobias and the Angel was in the collection of the nineteenth-century English Romantic painter, John Martin, who would have appreciated the breadth and remoteness of its setting -- features that he included in many of his own dramatic landscapes.

Style: Baroque, Academic
Saint John the Evangelist holds a chalice from which a serpent escapes. He appears on the inside of the left shutter of a small triptych (a painting in three parts) made by Hans Memling for the Welsh nobleman and diplomat Sir John Donne, probably in the late 1470s. The central panel and the other wing are also in the National Gallery's collection: The Virgin and Child with Saints and Donors and Saint John the Baptist.

According to the apocryphal Acts of Saint John, the saint was made to drink poison but survived; the serpent symbolises the poison. He is shown standing in a kind of loggia (open-sided gallery or room) decorated with marble columns, which runs across the other parts of the triptych. The floor is tiled and to the right there is a mullioned window with shutters -- such as would have been found in wealthy Netherlandish houses. Only the upper openings are glazed and in one of them we see a stained glass roundel showing the Donne coat of arms. The capital at the top of the column to the left is decorated with figs and fig leaves. We can see out into a courtyard, where a peacock is perched on a crumbling wall -- during the Renaissance, the bird was a symbol of immortality as its flesh was thought not to decay.

Although this figure of Saint John is very close to that in other paintings by Memling, and was presumably taken from a workshop pattern, infrared reflectograms show that the artist drew several versions of the hands and chalice before he was satisfied with them, and they were finally painted in a slightly different position to the underdrawing.

On the back of the panel, visible when the altarpiece was closed, Saint Anthony Abbot is painted in grisaille, as if he is a statue in a niche. Saint Anthony was a desert hermit in third-century Egypt and one of the founders of Western monasticism. He perhaps had a more immediate meaning for the Donnes, however. The family had a substantial house at Penallt, about three miles from Llansteffan on the coast of south Wales. In the Middle Ages Llansteffan was an important pilgrimage site due to a curative spring known as the Well of Saint Anthony.

Style: Gothic, Early Renaissance
These four saints come from a large polyptych made for the high altar of the church of San Giovanni Evangelista in Pratovecchio, Tuscany. This is the left wing, so they look to the right towards the ascension of Saint John in the centre panel.

We see Saint Bernard, his book inscribed 'S.BER'; a nun, probably Saint Scholastica, with her name scratched above her head; Saint Benedict, holding his glossary:attribute of a bunch of rods -- used for physical punishment -- and a book inscribed 'B'; and Saint John the Baptist with a scroll.

These saints were important for the nuns at San Giovanni, who belonged to the Camaldolese Order, a small reformed monastic order. Saint Benedict, one of the founders of western monasticism, was always shown in Camaldolese altarpieces as they followed his Rule (regulations) -- as in Lorenzo Monaco's altarpiece made for a Camaldolese monastery in Florence. Benedict wears white as this was the colour of the habits worn by the Order, and hold a bunch of rods with which to chastise those who failed to observe his Rule. San Giovanni Evangelista also governed the nunnery of San Benedetto in Arezzo, and nuns were allowed to come and go between the two houses.

Saint Scholastica, Benedict's sister, was the first abbess of the Benedictine Order and so very suitable for a Camaldolese nunnery. The inscription identifying her is not painted on top of the gilding but is the underlayer of red glossary:bole| showing through where the gilding has been scratched away. This is unlikely to have been done by the artist and is probably a later addition.

Saint Bernard, founder of the Cistercian Order , stood for stricter interpretation of the monastic rule -- like the one Camaldolites followed -- and Saint John the Baptist, who lived on honey and locusts in the wilderness, represents the ideal of living as a hermit. The Latin words on his scroll are those with which he recognised Christ as the Messiah: 'Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world' (John 1:29). He was also the glossary:patron saint of Florence, the nearest major town to Pratovecchio, and home of the artist.

Style: Gothic, Early Renaissance
This balding, grey-bearded saint can be identified as Saint Peter by the keys  which he rests on his thigh and supports with his right hand. These are the keys to the kingdom of heaven, which  Christ gave Peter as a symbol of his spiritual power. The keys themselves are unusually slender and elongated, just as the saint is younger, slighter and taller than he is often shown. He looks out at the viewer and raises his left hand in blessing.

This painting was originally part of  a large, multi-panelled altarpiece painted by Lorenzo Costa for the oratory of S. Pietro in Vincoli, Faenza. It appeared next to The Virgin and Child As the patron saint of the oratory, Peter was placed in the most prominent position, on the right-hand side of the Virgin and Child, with Saint Philip on the far side. The stepped architecture and landscape continues across all three panels.

In sixteenth-century Italy, the most common type of altarpiece consisted of the Virgin and Child enthroned and accompanied by saints. Here each saint occupies a single compartment, a conventional arrangement which continued to be used throughout the century, especially in more provincial centres. The central panel is considerably taller than the side ones, an especially popular design in Faenza: in 1506  Giovanni Battista Bertucci the Elder painted a triptych for the Camaldolese church of S. Ioppolito (Pinacoteca Communale, Faenza) which followed this pattern (although this might also have been a  response to the success of Costa's work).

Style: High Renaissance
In a warm and dark room Courbet’s rich, ripe apples seem to glow as if in firelight. Among them is a single pomegranate, squeezed in at the base of the heap. The heavy earthenware bowl lined with pale blue slip seems almost too small for the weight of the fruit piled into it. On the brown oak table, two apples sit in front of a pewter coffee pot that glints in the light. Close by is a tall, straight glass of red wine. The painting quickens all the senses. It is as if Courbet is saying that this simple scene holds all that is needed for fulfilment and contentment.

In 1871 Courbet was arrested for his part in the toppling of the Vendóme Column, erected in 1820 by Napoleon I to commemorate the Battle of Austerlitz, during the Paris Commune, the radical government that ruled Paris from March to the end of May that year. Always opposed to imperial rule, in 1870 Courbet had refused the Légion d’honneur and became a founding member of the Arts Commission of the Commune. When the Commune fell, Courbet was taken to Sainte Pélagie, a jail in Paris, because of his fierce, rebellious stance.

In Sainte Pélagie he was treated not as a political prisoner but as a commoner, and was denied painting materials. Although he was eventually given permission to paint, he was confined to his cell and forbidden to have models to pose for him. His sister Zoé brought him flowers and fruit, and he was able to explore still-life painting, a genre almost new to him. After an illness he was transferred to a clinic in Neuilly for the rest of his sentence, as a ward of the state.

Courbet was now painting prolifically. In the tradition of jailed artists of the past, and as a matter of pride that he had been imprisoned for his political beliefs, Courbet inscribed his paintings with the name of the prison. But while this picture is  inscribed ‘Sainte Pélagie’, it’s not clear whether he was in the jail or the clinic when he painted it. He was denied an exhibition, but collectors greeted his prison pictures with enthusiasm. Still-life pictures were increasingly appreciated at the time and he wrote that ‘my paintings are selling marvellously, and I am obliged to take advantage of it in order to make up for my disasters’.

The apples aren’t perfect. The shapes are uneven and knobbly, and the skins thick. A sharp knife would be needed to pare them, but the juice would run sweet from the red ones and sharp or bitter from the green. Several carry the brown marks of bruising or the beginnings of decay. Courbet had studied the still-life paintings of seventeenth-century Dutch artists in which rotting fruit, dying flowers, short lived insects or the embers of a fire were symbols of the fleeting nature of life. While flawed, Courbet’s apples are things of beauty. Rather than a warning of death, they are his affirmation of life -- each one singular, sweet-smelling and tactile.

Style: Barbizon
William Feilding, 1st Earl of Denbigh steps forward, gun in hand. He is shown life-size. We look up at him from below, which emphasises his commanding pose, but the elegance and urbanity usually present in Anthony van Dyck’s formal portraits seems to be missing. This is partly because of the Earl’s relaxed clothing -- a mix of contemporary Indian and European fashions -- and because the pose is a little contrived and awkward. The setting is also more like a stage set than a real place. The Indian servant boy points up at the parrot that the Earl can already see. He points awkwardly across his body rather than directly up at the bird and both of them look puzzled, as if wondering what to do next.

Van Dyck must have collaborated closely with his sitters, agreeing on dress and pose. He painted them as they wished to be seen, but also presented their characters as they revealed themselves to him. The Earl had returned from a voyage to India to visit the early settlements imposed by the East India Company; it is this important trip that he must have wanted to commemorate. Other portraits of him are more formal and conventional.

He wears a silk jacket and pyjamas (these are the light, loose trousers, not the nightwear whose name has subsequently come into English from Urdu). He was one of the few Europeans in India at the time to adopt indigenous dress, but in the portrait he wears it with the ornate collar worn at the court of Charles I. The servant's costume is not authentic -- it appears to have come from a dressing up box kept in van Dyck’s studio containing 'exotic' garments to be worn by any Asian or African servant figure in his pictures. The palm tree, too, is unreal, probably taken from the often highly imaginative illustrations brought back from India, and behind the Earl is a very English looking oak. The parrot is likely to be a South American macaw and not an Indian bird. Despite the unreality of this work, the Earl was obviously eager to be seen as an intrepid traveller, not only immersing himself in Indian culture but, by adopting local dress, almost part of it. Certainly the portrait is unique in its depiction of an Englishman in India in the early seventeenth century, and it probably caused comment among viewers of his time.

The Earl was the brother-in-law of the Duke of Buckingham, favourite of Charles I. As the Duke’s influence increased, the Earl received various offices and dignities, becoming an Admiral in 1625 and later, in the 1630s, ambassador to the court of Shah Safi of Persia. During the Civil War in Britain he served under Prince Rupert at the Battle of Edgehill in 1642. The following year, he was wounded during Rupert’s attack on Birmingham and died from the effects.

Style: Baroque, Stuart