Naked Chick in a Garage by arsidubu on Worth1000. Click for full image.

February 3 is the birthday of Norman Percevel Rockwell [wiki], the popular American painter and illustrator who shot to fame with his cover illustrations of everyday life scenarios he created for The Saturday Evening Post magazine over more than four decades. Born in 1894, Rockwell was only partly a contemporary of William Bouguereau, who died in 1905 (Rockwell died in 1978).

The image above is a posthumous reunion of the two masters, created for a contest in 2005 on photoshop site Worth1000. Digital artist arsidubu merged Rockwell’s 1945 painting The Homecoming Marine with Bouguereau’s 1884 work Les Deux Baigneuses (The Two Bathers), and named it Naked Chick in a Garage.

Below you can view the two original paintings. Click the first to visit the gallery where you will find many more remastered versions of the original work. Click the second to read more about Rockwell’s painting, which was purchased by an anonymous buyer in May 2006 for $9.2 million, a record price for a Rockwell painting at the time.