wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
Around 1880, when Gauguin was enjoying some prosperity as a stockbroker in Paris, he bought six paintings by Cezanne, of which  Still Life with Fruit Dish (1879--80, Museum of Modern Art, New York) seems to have been his favourite. He described it as ‘an exceptional pearl, the apple of my eye’. Even when he left most of his collection in Copenhagen in 1883 when he parted from his Danish wife, he took this picture back to Paris with him, and he refused to sell it until he was desperate for money towards the end of his life.

Gauguin spent extended periods of time in Brittany in the late 1880s and early 1890s in search of a more ‘primitive’, simpler way of life than that offered by Paris, and new sources of inspiration.  When he travelled to Brittany in 1890 he brought along his Cezanne picture, and included it in the background of A Portrait of a Woman (Art Institute of Chicago) painted that year. He probably painted this still life at about the same time as a further homage to Cezanne. It repeats many of the elements in Cezanne's still life, such as the fruit, the pottery, the rumpled tablecloth and the angled knife at the lower right, which is almost a direct quotation from that picture.

By the 1880s, Cezanne was emerging as the leading French avant-garde artist, and other aspiring artists needed to show that they understood and had absorbed his work. At the time Gauguin was moving away from Impressionism, with its emphasis on painting techniques that captured transient natural phenomena, and searching for a more structured approach to his work. He may have felt that Cezanne pointed the way towards an art with more rigour. The truncated diagonal brushstrokes and the flattened perspective, in which foreground and distance are collapsed together, certainly seem to be taken from Cezanne. The curiously two-dimensional tankard may be one that was made locally; it looks like the kind of drinking vessel used by the Breton peasants and fishermen among whom Gauguin was living.

The thin strip at the top of the picture – a dense arrangement of roof tops – is something of an enigma. The inclusion of a frame suggests that it is meant to represent a view from a window, but there is none of the continuity between the clearly defined larger scene and the smaller blurred image next to it that one would expect.  Furthermore, the  buildings look more like a cityscape than a small Breton village.  No specific location has yet been identified, however, and this assembly of geometrical shapes may even have been a purely imaginary tribute to Cezanne’s landscapes, which often feature buildings closely packed together.

The artist’s characteristic signature ‘P Go’, which he began to use around this time, is placed upside down in the lower left corner. There is no obvious reason for this, but perhaps Gauguin intended to make it seem as though it were carved into the table top.

Style: Nabi, Symbolist
Johan Christian Dahl probably visited the waterfalls at Labro (Labrofoss) when on a sketching trip in Norway, his country of birth, in 1826. This picture was painted in his Dresden studio the following year and was sold in 1828 to a Mr Bracebridge, a British businessman and trader from London.

Around 80 kilometres west of Oslo, the Labrofoss are among Norway’s major falls. Dahl shows the lower part of the rapids, placing us on flat rocks directly facing the torrent surging through a narrow gully. He applied the white paint thickly to suggest the power and roughness of the water as it cascades over the rocks. In the background, tall pine trees, interspersed with deciduous trees, are silhouetted against a darkening sky. The low clouds are tinged with violet as dusk descends.

Although a rugged landscape, this is not untamed wilderness. Look closely and you can see a large wooden hut on the left and two woodcutters, one holding an axe, near the centre of the painting. Despite being dwarfed by the trees and massive boulders, the woodcutters’ presence, together with the logs that tumble down the falls and gather at the bottom of the picture, show that this countryside is harvested for its resources. This practice continues today: Labrofoss is now the site of a hydroelectric power station.

Born and raised in Bergen in Norway, Dahl lived most of his life outside of the country, although he regularly returned there later in life, beginning with the trip he made in 1826. In 1811 he had moved to Copenhagen where he studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and formed a friendship with Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg. Seven years later he relocated to Dresden, where in 1825 he was made a professor at the city's art academy.

While in Dresden, Dahl formed a close friendship with the German landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich. Dahl shared Friedrich's Romantic view of landscape, stating in a letter of 1818 to Prince Christian Frederick (who later became king of both Norway and Denmark) that, 'most of all I am representing nature in its freedom and wildness'. However, despite his interest in mood and drama, Dahl's landscapes are not infused with the spiritual significance and still intensity of Friedrich's. The single tree that stands alone on the left bank in this picture does not, for example, have the symbolic overtones of Friedrich’s Winter Landscape. Instead, Dahl's romanticism is tempered by detailed naturalism and anecdotal detail, such as the woodcutters and their hut that we see here.

Style: Romantic
Pissarro and his family moved to Louveciennes in the spring of 1869, and he may have painted this picture shortly afterwards, or possibly in the spring of 1870. The white blossom on the apple trees indicates the time of year.

Only 30 minutes west of Paris by train, Louveciennes was an important location for the formation of early Impressionism, as it was one of the small towns and villages that were frequently visited by Impressionist painters in the late 1860s and early 1870s. Sisley lived nearby and Renoir often visited his parents’ summer home there.

The picture was formerly titled Springtime, View of Louveciennes, although this is not in fact a view of the town, which is some distance away, to the left of the picture. Instead, we are looking at a road called the route de la Princesse, which ran from the train station at Bougival (where Monet was living) to Pissarro’s house in Louveciennes. The group of houses in the middle of the painting is the neighbouring village of Voisins. Part of the Marly aqueduct can be seen against the sky on the left.

Pissarro has arranged the scene as a series of layered bands, with the road and a row of bushes or vines in the foreground and, in the distance, the hills and aqueduct. The gentle rise and fall of the landscape recalls paintings by Corot, who Pissarro had met and whose paintings he had closely studied, as does the plain country road along which several local residents are travelling. Closest to us is a peasant woman wearing a white bonnet; furthest back is a man driving a simple wagon pulled by a donkey or mule. Pissarro has kept all four figures in the middle and far distance, their features undefined, so they do not distract us from the overall composition.

Corot’s influence can also be seen in the painting’s soft tones and range of colours, particularly its earthy browns and the warm yellow-ochre for the road. Here, Pissarro has followed Corot’s advice to pay attention to a painting's 'values' (Corot's term for the tonal relationships within it). However, Pissarro's looser brushwork is more pronounced than that of Corot, who was critical of Impressionism -- for example, where he builds up structure with small strokes and dabs of paint.

Renoir painted the same view a few months later (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). But whereas Pissarro presents an agricultural scene populated by rural people, Renoir’s landscape is more untamed. He also included a well-dressed bourgeois family who pass by a peasant wearing traditional blue clothing, to create an image of a middle-class stroll in the countryside rather than a working landscape.

Style: Impressionist
We seem to be sitting in a box at the theatre, which we share with two young women. But we can’t be sure what is going on. We can’t see the stage and we have only a very partial view of the audience. One woman is looking away from us and the back of her bonnet hides most of the other’s face, so we can’t gauge their expressions clearly or make a reliable judgement as to how old they are. Nor can we tell what they are looking at.

This sense of mystery -- of a hidden narrative -- is enhanced by the fact that the nearer of the two women is sitting very upright and leaning forward slightly, as though something is absorbing her attention. This is hardly surprising given the occasion, but it may not be the stage performance which has captured her eye. In nineteenth-century Paris, attending the theatre was as much about social status as it was about watching the show -- seeing who was there, what they were wearing and with whom they were associating.

The grand staircase in the foyer of the Palais Garnier opera house, which had opened only a year or two before this painting was made, was built with a series of balconies on either side -- vantage points to view those arriving at the theatre. The auditorium itself, like many others in the city, was designed with boxes that faced more towards the rest of the audience than towards the stage: the occupants were on display as much as the performers. Renoir was clearly conscious of this tension. In La Loge (Courtauld Institute, London), his other famous painting of a theatre box, one of the occupants is depicted using his opera glasses not to focus on the stage but to scan the audience around him.

We get a strong sense of an atmosphere of people-watching in this picture too. Among the loosely sketched audience in the background, Renoir has made two figures -- a man in the lower tier and a woman in the tier above him -- stand out. They seem to have their eyes turned, either on us or, we might think, on the young woman in the box. He also made changes to the composition to increase the focus on her. X-radiography shows that he painted over two additional figures who were seated in the front of the box.

Renoir did not give this painting its current title  La Première Sortie ('the first outing') so it is not a reliable guide to how we should interpret it. This title was first used in 1923, when the picture was sold in a London auction. This was after Renoir’s death and nearly 50 years after the picture was made. The title was probably applied to make the painting more marketable and seems to stem from the perceived youth of the woman in black, the apparent excitement suggested by her posture and the fact that she clasps a bunch of flowers.

Before 1923 the painting had been referred to more neutrally as 'Au Théâtre’ ('At the Theatre') and also 'Le Café-Concert’, which is strange as the setting is much grander than the sort of venue where café concerts, which were such a popular entertainment at the time, were held. There is no evidence that any of these was used by Renoir, who often gave his paintings no titles at all.

Style: Impressionist
In the summer of 1867, the German artist Adolph Menzel stayed in Paris for nine weeks. It was his second visit to the city and it coincided with the Universal Exhibition, which ran from April until October. While in Paris, Menzel almost certainly visited Manet's pavilion. Manet had not been invited to participate in the official fair but, following the example of Courbet -- who had set up his own ‘Pavilion of Realism’ when his monumental canvas The Painter’s Studio (Musée d’Orsay, Paris) was rejected by the 1855 Universal Exhibition -- he set up his own pavilion nearby. It displayed around 50 of Manet's paintings, including Music in the Tuileries Gardens (1862). A pencil drawing in Menzel’s Paris sketchbook of the crowd at the Tuileries Gardens affirms that he had seen Manet’s picture and that it made a deep impression upon him.

Menzel began work on his own painting of the Tuileries Gardens as soon as he returned to Berlin. Not only was it a response to Manet, but it was also the first of what was to become a series of modern urban scenes. Half the size of Manet’s picture, Menzel's work directly quotes from it. For example, the man in a top hat seen in profile leaning forward, partly covered by a tree, replicates Manet’s brother Eugène, and in both pictures a child crouches down in the foreground. But Menzel’s picture is no copy or pastiche of Manet’s. The differences between the two are more telling than their similarities, and Menzel’s painting might be viewed as a rejection of Manet. Significantly, when first exhibited in Berlin in 1858, Menzel’s work was titled Sunday Afternoon in the Tuileries Gardens, from Memory, and he also added an abbreviation for Berlin after his signature to emphasise that it was not painted from life in Paris. Instead, the picture is a synthesis of vignettes or impressions, perhaps based upon observation, assembled in his studio to form a single scene.

There are important differences between the two pictures. While Manet used a frieze-like composition, Menzel has created deep paths through the trees at sharp angles to the picture plane, which open up the space and also allow him to include more figures. The foreground also tilts forward slightly to offer us an aerial view across the park towards its entrance on the rue de Rivoli. Menzel 's emphasis on illusion and depth is very different from Manet’s on the flat surface of the canvas. In contrast to Manet's lack of modelling, Menzel has maintained an effect of atmospheric recession, as figures in the foreground are painted in minute detail and almost tip out of the picture, while those further back are painted more freely. Manet’s picture shows people drawn mainly from a single class -- the Parisian haute bourgeoisie -- whereas Menzel’s picturesque realism, full of busy detail and anecdote, shows a heterogeneous crowd of various ages, classes and nationalities. Seen together, the two pictures show there was more than one way to depict 'modern life'.

Style: Realist
Charles Rémond, who studied with the neo-classical landscapist Jean-Victor Bertin (1767–-1842), won the Prix de Rome for historical landscape in 1821 with The Rape of Proserpina by Pluto (Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris). During his four years at the French Academy in Rome, he not only sketched in the environs of Rome, but also travelled around Italy, visiting Naples and Sicily.

The view here is from the town of Anacapri on the slopes of Monte Solaro, the highest mountain on the island of Capri, looking east towards Monte Tiberio and Capri town. Beyond can be seen the mainland of Italy. The artist has captured the vertiginous drop to the sea, on which can be glimpsed a tiny boat with two white sails.

Style: Neoclassical
Princess Pauline Sander (1836--1921) was the wife of Prince Richard Metternich, the Austro-Hungarian Ambassador at the court of Napoleon III from 1860 to 1871. Known as the ‘ambassadress of pleasure’, she was a glamorous figure in Parisian high society during the Second Empire. A pioneer of fashion, she promoted new styles of dress, including the crinoline.

The Princess had already been painted by the society portraitist Franz Xaver Winterhalter, and by the seascape artist Eugène Boudin, who showed her standing in profile on a beach. Degas may have seen the couple at the racetrack or ballet -- the Prince was a leading member of the Jockey Club, which had an important role in both horse racing and in the running of the Paris Opera -- but the young artist did not paint his portrait from life. Instead, he made a partial copy of a full-length carte de visite (visiting card) photograph of the Princess and her husband taken around 1867 by Eugène Disdéri (1819--1889). Disdéri had made his fortune by popularising the carte de visite, which he patented in 1854. These were made by gluing a small photograph to a card mount, which was the size of a standard visiting card.

In the photograph, Princess Pauline stands alongside her husband, her left arm entwined in his right. In his portrait, however, Degas has removed the Prince completely and also the Princess’s left arm. She is isolated against a background of floral wallpaper, which overlaps her right sleeve. The close repetition of the floral motif, which has been drawn with graphite pencil and then covered with a wash of paint, suggests that Degas may have traced the pattern directly onto the canvas. Unlike the photograph, Degas’s picture is in colour, albeit very limited in range. Two colours dominate -- variations of a mustard or Naples yellow with a greenish tinge, which takes on an antique gold hue for the wallpaper, and variations of a grey-black for the dress and hair.

Degas has retained the military style of the Princess’s bodice, but the picture's flat background helps project her forward in space, an effect enhanced by the thicker paint on her face, hair and clothes. The painting of the face itself is particularly striking, especially when compared with the photograph. Despite its small size, the carte de visite has a sharply focused clarity and strong shadows, but Degas has softened the Princess’s features, notably her eyes. In the photograph her mouth is made prominent by shadow, but Degas paints it using just a single thin line of black paint that is barely visible in places. Her nose is reduced to two judiciously placed -- and slightly asymmetrical -- black dots for the nostrils. Above all, Degas creates a remarkable effect of blurred movement -- as if the Princess has been caught just as she turns her head -- that is not present in the photograph's more formal pose.

This is one of the first portraits to have been based on a photograph, and Degas makes no attempt to disguise its photographic origin. He remained deeply interested in photography, and a number of his paintings reveal his careful study of this new medium.

Style: Impressionist, Realist
Under a stormy sunset sky a distant range of mountains is strung out along the horizon, in front of which lies a line of brown hills. In the foreground, standing at the edge of what is possibly an expanse of water, is a figure dressed in black and wearing a white hat. He is perhaps fishing. The immediate foreground is a mass of dark olive-brown undergrowth and vegetation, with trees to the left. This view was formerly  dated to Rousseau's 1830 trip to the Auvergne (for which see The Valley of Saint-Vincent), and identified as a view of that region. It is now thought to date from later in his career, and has been associated with the trip he made in 1844 with Jule-Louis Dupré to the Landes, a region south of Bordeaux, and the Pyrenees. In his 1872 biography of Rousseau, Alfred Sensier wrote of how the pair, attracted by the desolate and inhospitable nature of the area, made a prolonged visit, staying for five months in all. Many of Rousseau’s views of the region feature a vast plain, often with a chain of mountains in the distance, for example The Plain in front of the Pyrenees (about 1845, Louvre, Paris). In our painting the mountains in the distance are probably also the Pyrenees.

The sky is thickly painted with multiple layers of blues, greys and pinks. Broad brushstrokes have been used to bring the sky paint down over the mountains on the horizon, in some cases obscuring their outlines. The area of water is even more thickly painted, with strong impasto. In places Rousseau had more than one colour on his brush, such as a mixture of creamy yellow, grey and a variety of greens. This thick application of paint and rigorous brushwork is certainly typical of Rousseau's technique in the 1840s. The scene is painted on top of an earlier  composition, some of which is visible to the naked eye through thinner areas of paint. At the bottom right, for example, you can see a round bucket or barrel, its planks clearly delineated.  There is also a structure similar to a boat, complete with sails, lying underneath the paint layers.

Style: Barbizon
A native of Berne, Switzerland, Ferdinand Hodler spent much of 1902 in the Oberland painting mountainous landscapes. This work depicts the Kien Valley looking towards the Bluemlisalp, a massif at the far end of the valley.

The subject wasn’t new: Hodler’s earliest works were landscape souvenirs, created for a growing tourist market. Highly naturalistic in style, they continued the Swiss Alpine tradition to which Alexandre Calame (1810–1864) brought international recognition. Although initially Hodler emulated Calame – indeed, in 1874 he won the locally prestigious Concours Calame – he later distanced himself from the representation of reality.

During his artistic retreats in the Alps – not so different, in spirit, from Gauguin’s travels in the South Seas or Van Gogh’s sojourn in Arles - Hodler aimed to render what he called the 'essential structure' of the landscape, 'liberated from all unimportant details'. This picture – with its insistent verticality, defined fields of colour and ornamental decorative clouds – conveys a sense of timelessness, harmony and meditative stillness. 'The landscape must have a character', Hodler wrote, 'express a passion or an emotion'. With a striking economy of means, in which geometry and composition don’t diminish, but rather enhance, nature’s mystical element, this painting harks back to the tradition of Japanese woodcut prints. At the same time an adept of Idealism and a forerunner of Symbolism, Hodler believed that  'the mission of the artist is [...] to express the eternal element of nature'.

Fervently admired almost as a patriotic obligation in Switzerland but for a half century little noted beyond its borders, the critical  reassessment of Hodler abroad began in the 1970s. Along with Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch and others, Hodler is today regarded as a key figure of a distinctly Northern European modernist tradition largely independent of Paris.

Style: Post-Impressionist
A supremely poised young woman is painted in three-quarter view. Her right hand curls around the handle of a mirror, while she appears to be caressing a lock of hair with her left. She wears a white blouse under a black velvet bodice which is trimmed with red ribbon, and over her arms yellow detachable sleeves, decorated with a blue bow from which three blue ribbons fall. This study is one of a number that Corot painted during the last years of his life, many of which are characterised by an air of introspection and melancholy.

According to an early biographer, Etienne Moreau-Nélaton, he would take a week out from painting landscapes to concentrate on capturing on canvas the special qualities of a particular model, the identity of whom is often not known. The origins of these studies lay in his first visit to Italy in 1825--8, when he not only painted the landscape but also made studies of the people, including several of women dressed in traditional costume.

The different pieces of clothing included here also appear in other paintings by Corot. The black bodice actually belongs to a dress which can be seen in its entirety in The Reader (1868, Minneapolis Institute of Art), and the sleeves, sometimes minus their blue ribbons, can be seen in a number of studies of women, of which the earliest is The Woman with a Pansy (1855--8, Denver Museum of Art). These sleeves were part of Italian traditional costume, and were tied over an undergarment allowing it to show, and in some cases billow out over the top. Corot kept assorted articles of dress in his studio with which to clothe his models. He was particularly interested in Italian costume, and in 1857 he asked for items to be sent from Albano, near Rome. In his depictions of such dress he was not interested in authenticity, but took delight in mixing up the different pieces to create a pleasing juxtaposition of colours and textures.

Style: Barbizon