Paintings Worth Looking At

Hello all - my recent blog articles have been scarce, but I'm pleased to announce the American Folk Portraits Wiki ( https://americanfolkportraits.miraheze.org/wiki/Main_Page ) now features 250+ artists and 750+ signed/credibly inscribed portraits. These painters range from the well-known to the obscure, and span the entire 19th century. I hope this will serve as a valuable reference point for identification and attribution. Work on the wiki is far from complete, and will resume as soon as I finish this post. For now, enjoy! 

One might be forgiven for assuming that the onslaught of low-quality images generated by AI, littering social media like a graveyard, has not affected real painting scholarship. Unfortunately, that is not entirely true. Certain types of AI styles are good enough to fool the unwary. They occasionally pop up in art history discussion groups online. I’ve even had personal encounters with these fakes myself. In the interest of a warning, and a word to the wise, here’s some pointers on how to spot them.

So you’ve been trying to do some historical research, but you’re vexed by the old-time habit of English people not writing in English? You’ve come to the right place. Highbrow scholars used to conduct their correspondence in the languages of the ancients, using so many extra words that it’d put Charles Dickens to shame, except Dickens very sensibly wrote in his native tongue, which gives him a real advantage here. 1600s London literati — like the usual suspect, Baldwin Hamey — didn’t do us that favor. The method I've used and demonstrated in this guide, to extract handwritten Latin text and process it into English, relies on an AI-powered version of OCR technology (optical character recognition). Here's how.