Detail of Bouguereau Meets Magritte by geldkobra. Click for full image.

By the time William Bouguereau died (in 1905), René Magritte [wiki] was only an 8-year old boy, living in Belgium. In other words: the two men never met. But even if they had known each other, Bouguereau wouldn’t have liked Magritte’s work — he hated the impressionists and would never had appreciated surrealism either.

The image shown above is a 21st century product of an impossible encounter. It shows Magritte’s famous 1935 piece La Magie Noire and the Cupid figure from Bouguereau’s 1889 work L’Amour et Psyche, enfants (Cupid and Psyche as Children), brought together by German digital artist geldkobra. It was her entry in a Re(n)union contest on Worth1000 in 2005. The challenge was to take parts of two or more paintings by different artists and put them together to create one new masterpiece.

Below you can see how the two paintings were merged. Click to visit the gallery where you will discover many more remastered versions of the original Bouguereau artwork.