A Visual Analytics System for Interactive Exploration of Historical Painter Cohorts

Painter cohort analysis has long been regarded as a key lens for studying how painting artistic styles develop and transmit across generations. Through a two-year collaboration with art historians, we identify key challenges in traditional painter cohort research: the unstructured characteristic of painter features, the entangled complexity of inheritance relationships, and the cognitively demanding nature of cohort definition and validation. To solve these challenges, we propose HPC-Vis, a visual analytics system for interactive exploration of historical painter cohorts. An improved cohort analytical workflow is designed to integrate structured feature construction, visualization-assisted exploration, algorithm-based recommendation, and unified cohort management. Based on this workflow, we develop three core computational modules: a multi-scale artistic feature construction method that leverages LLMs to extract and organize hierarchical style features from unstructured historical texts, an inheritance reconstruction algorithm that transforms the entangled multi-parent inheritance network into a clear hierarchical forest structure, and a recommendation model that identifies core features of the cohort and recommends cohort members via painter relevance assessment. To support smooth interactive exploration, we further design a set of novel visualizations with multidimensional collaboration, especially an inheriting mountain view inspired by traditional Chinese landscape paintings, and a foldable doughnut chart for hierarchical artistic style labels. HPC-Vis is evaluated and validated through case studies, user studies, and technical evaluations, demonstrating its effectiveness in supporting painter cohort exploration and in providing visual insights for art historical research.