Left: Soft Eyes. Right: You Didn’t Waste Time, Plate 2. Both images by Thomas Hawk. Click links to view on Flickr.

Au Pied de la Falaise (At the Foot of the Cliff, 1886) is one of Bouguereau’s lesser known paintings. American photographer Thomas Hawk (website, Flickr) discovered it in the Brooks Museum of Art, in Memphis, Tennessee, and was apparently smitten with the girl’s beautiful eyes. Shown above are two of his remastered versions of the painting. Both are digitally processed close-ups of her face.

Thomas Hawk calls himself as a person with an “obsessive compulsive view on photography”, and his aim is to publish a library of a million finished, processed photographs before he dies. He still has some way to go; currently his Flickr photo stream contains “just” 44,000+ images!

Shown below is Bouguereau’s original painting. Unfortunately it is the largest image available.