William-Adolphe Bouguereau

He's the whole package.

Yeah, Bouguereau, Leyendecker.

You know, these are people that you don't get better at drawing.

You get different, but you don't get better.

fated to create works of art that are unsatisfying in the long run because they are iterative, because they look back at themselves.

It would be like if you were in 1870 and AI existed in 1870 and you asked AI to show you a picture of a great painting, it would show you some classical painting by Bouguereau with naked, drapey ladies floating through the clouds and a couple of angels and painted in some classical tradition.

And it would predict that this is the future of fine art for the next 25 years.

Meanwhile, Monet is sitting there doing his very first impressionist paintings.

Like for me right

now, it's looking at William Bouguereau's pictures and learning as much as I can about how Bouguereau painted his pictures, because I see particular things happening in his work that I want in my own work.

So that can just be a matter of, you know, setting a target, that painter, how were they doing that? So very, very direct, very matter of fact kind of stuff.

What were the materials? What were the layers? What did each layer do on top of the other? What is the sum total of all of it? There's always something philosophical which can just be the general orientation of like what the pictures are trying to convey.

...

I interviewed him on the podcast, and he's just a great artist and, and thinker, and he posted this thing that was contrasting Sargent with Bouguereau.

Uh-huh.

And it was like everybody was just like, "Oh, Sargent," just like fawning over Sargent.

I'm going-

Yeah

... with Bouguereau here," you know? Um, which was a very unpopular take-

Oh

But in this case, this is actually an AI-generated face that I started this whole project by putting in prompts into ChatGPT, basically saying two things.

One was, "Show me something like Bouguereau," like William-Adolphe Bouguereau's painting, and then, "Show me a face from 2026." And the reason I was doing that was I felt, like, a strange parallel between what's happening now and what was happening in Bouguereau's time when the world was changing.

The railroads were being developed.

The world was feeling smaller.

It is my weakness.

The landscape is a genuine corot, and though a connoisseur might throw a doubt upon that Salvatore Rosa, there cannot be the least question about the Bouguereau.

I am partial to the modern French school.

You will excuse me, Mr. Sholto, said Miss Morstan.