Detail of Turn it Up by Thomas Hawk on Flickr. Click for full image (up to 3,744px x 3,744px).

Although William Bouguereau was a masterful portrait painter, the image above is not a true portrait. Rather, it’s a very strong close-up of one of Bouguereau’s most famous paintings: Les Deux Baigneuses (The Two Bathers) created in 1884. Prolific Flickr member Thomas Hawk (with over 35,000 images online!) was intrigued by the face of one of the bathing beauties. In his own words:

“I wanted to capture the beauty of the overall main view of the painting of course, and took the standard photograph for that, but I felt this facial view especially was compelling. The way the artist interpreted light and shadows creating a stunning soft portrayal of beauty was compelling.

To highlight the shadows and light work especially, I chose to process this detail shot in black and white. Forcing the viewer to focus on these rich elements of the work.

I also thought the cracks in the painting were interesting. I love the sense of age that they give to the work, the time worn feel. This may sound odd, but I also liked how the cracks were running with the same angles of the facial features, especially the eyes.

I thought about using photoshop to hide the cracks, but to me they are part of essence of this work and they tell a story as to its longevity, so rather than try and mute them out, I actually tried to turn them up. Hence the title Turn it Up.”

Below is the original Bouguereau painting, together with a close-up, and the black and white version created by Thomas Hawk. Click the first to visit the gallery where you can find many more remastered versions of the original painting. Click the others to view them on Flickr.