Bouguereau’s New Puppy by preemiememe, inspired by Bouguereau’s Douleur d’amour (Elegy, 1899). Click to discover the puppy — in jeans!

February 2009 marked the 180th birthday of Levi Strauss, who founded the first company to manufacture blue jeans. To celebrate the event, FreakingNews challenged digital artists to join a Jeans Art contest, and invited them to add jeans to any works of art. Out of the twenty entries no less than five were Remastered Bouguereaus. Would any of the contestants have realized that Levis Strauss and William Bouguereau were actually contemporaries (Strauss was born in 1828, Bouguereau in 1825)? And how many of them would have known that blue denim is derived from the French bleu de Nîmes?

Anyway, the contest yielded a second prize for William Bouguereau’s New Puppy by American artist preemiememe, and a fourth prize for Bouguereau Jeans by Mandrak from Brazil.

Shown below are all five Remastered Bouguereaus in this contest. Click each to visit the galleries where you can find many more contemporary versions of the original paintings.