Imagine Watteau

Abstract

Artificial intelligence promises to transform the field of art restoration, offering the possibility of reconstructing works long thought lost. In an admittedly unscientific experiment, I use Midjourney to simulate Antoine Watteau’s missing painting Abigail Bringing Food to David, only to find that the result elicits a peculiar sadness. The image, in its uncanny familiarity, provides a remarkable synthesis of elements found in Watteau’s best-known paintings. Instead of restoring something lost, it reveals the tendency of AI to confirm preconceptions of how an artist’s work ought to look.