Salvador Dalí's watercolour "The Ship" (dated 1942–43 in the original feature), restaged by Justin Nunnink: the human figure with a sailing ship for a body becomes a real person carrying a rig of cloth sails above the waves.
What happens when you ask ordinary people to rebuild a masterpiece with whatever they have at home? The art blog Booooooom, founded by the Vancouver artist and curator Jeff Hamada, tried exactly that. It invited readers to recreate their favourite classic paintings as modern photographs, and photographers, students, art lovers and families sent in hundreds of entries: some painstakingly faithful, some gleefully irreverent.
The best of them became a book, Remake: Master Works of Art Reimagined, edited by Hamada and published by Chronicle Books in June 2015. It pairs 50 famous artworks with their contemporary versions over 128 pages, and Chronicle described it as a crowdsourced send-up of the art-history canon. The 2018 feature that first ran here linked to the book on the publisher's site.
Below, each pairing is shown with the original artwork's background and what the remake changes. Credits follow those given with the images; where a maker is not identified, we say so.
Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces, restaged
Michelangelo, "The Creation of Adam" — remake "Hand Me a Beer"
Michelangelo painted this scene on the Sistine Chapel ceiling in Rome around 1511–1512, as part of the vast fresco cycle he worked on between 1508 and 1512. Its near-touching fingers of God and Adam have become one of the most copied images in Western art. In this remake, by makers who are not credited, the divine spark becomes a can of beer passed from a sofa to a floor cushion, with empty cans piled around.
A wider crop of the same remake shows how carefully the pose was matched: the reclining figure on the left mirrors Adam's angle, and the outstretched arm from the couch echoes the figure of God. The joke only works because the composition is so precise.
Leonardo da Vinci, "Lady with an Ermine"
Leonardo's portrait, painted around 1489–1491 and now in the Czartoryski Museum in Kraków, is generally thought to show Cecilia Gallerani, a young woman at the Milan court of Ludovico Sforza. The remake keeps the three-quarter turn, the dark background and the animal held at the chest, but swaps the Renaissance gown for a 1920s-style headband and beads. The sitter's sideways gaze, the detail that makes the original feel so alive, is carried over intact.
El Greco, "Lady in a Fur Wrap"
This portrait, dated to around 1577–1580 and held at Pollok House in Glasgow, is traditionally attributed to El Greco, although scholars have debated the attribution and the sitter's identity. The modern version recreates the fur wrap, the headscarf framing the face and the hand resting at the chest. Against a plain black backdrop, the contemporary sitter's direct gaze feels just as composed as the original.
Annibale Carracci, "The Bean Eater"
Carracci painted this unusually down-to-earth scene in the 1580s; it hangs in the Galleria Colonna in Rome. At a time when most painting showed saints and nobles, he gave a peasant's plain meal his full attention, mouth open, spoon halfway to it. The remake reproduces the straw hat, the bowl of beans, the bread, onions and wine, turning a 400-year-old snapshot of hunger into a staged dinner photo.
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century classics
Jean-Honoré Fragonard, "Young Girl Reading"
Fragonard's quick, loosely brushed portrait from around 1770 belongs to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The book's spread pairs it with two remakes: one by Sona Brabencova, and one by Lisa Reynolds and Dana Reynolds. Both keep the yellow dress, the cushion behind the back and the bowed head, but the little book becomes a smartphone in one and a tablet in the other.
Jacques-Louis David, "The Death of Marat" — remake by Adrianne Adelle
David painted this in 1793, months after the revolutionary journalist Jean-Paul Marat was stabbed in his bath by Charlotte Corday. The original, now in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels, turned a political murder into something close to a religious image. Adrianne Adelle's remake keeps the turbaned head, the drooping arm, the letter and the wooden crate, translating a piece of revolutionary propaganda into a quiet studio still.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, "La Grande Odalisque" — the book's cover
The cover of Remake pairs Ingres's 1814 reclining nude, now in the Louvre, with a male model in the same pose, complete with turban, peacock-feather fan and draped curtain. Ingres was criticised in his day for giving the woman an impossibly long back. Swapping the gender of the figure makes the conventions of the classical nude, and who usually gets painted, suddenly obvious.
Eugène Delacroix, "Orphan Girl at the Cemetery"
Delacroix painted this study around 1823, and it is now in the Louvre. The girl's frightened upward glance and slipping blouse made it one of the most emotionally charged studies of the young Romantic painter. The remake places the model against a grey, misty landscape and copies the turn of the head and the off-shoulder blouse closely, keeping the sense that something unseen has just caught her attention.
Henry Raeburn, "Boy and Rabbit"
The Scottish portraitist Henry Raeburn painted this charming picture of a boy cuddling a white rabbit in the early nineteenth century; it is held by the Royal Academy of Arts in London. The remake, credited by watermark to a photography studio, swaps the rabbit for a soft toy and the period hat for a baseball cap, while keeping the ruffled white shirt, golden trousers and leafy backdrop.
Victorian and turn-of-the-century beauty
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, "The Day Dream" — remake by Tania Brassesco and Lazlo Passi Norberto
Rossetti finished this painting in 1880, using his longtime muse Jane Morris as the model; it is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. She sits in a sycamore tree, lost in thought, a small flower forgotten in her lap. Brassesco and Passi Norberto drain almost all the colour out of the scene, dressing the model in white among pale branches, which turns Rossetti's lush green reverie into something ghostly.
Herbert James Draper's rose-petal painting
The original here appears to be by the British painter Herbert James Draper, whose signature is visible in the corner; it matches his "Pot-Pourri" of 1897, showing a woman in black sorting a table covered in rose petals. The remake, by an unnamed contributor, copies the swept-up hair, the blue-and-white vase and the drifts of petals with remarkable care. Draper is better known for mythological scenes, which makes this quiet domestic picture an interesting choice.
Ramon Casas, "After the Ball" — remake by Tania Brassesco and Lazlo Passi Norberto
The Catalan painter Ramon Casas painted this scene in 1895: a young woman in a black evening dress sprawled, exhausted, across a green sofa with a book dropped beside her. It is a key work of Catalan modernisme and is held at the Museu de Montserrat. The Italian duo Brassesco and Passi Norberto, who have built a body of work around restaging historic paintings, match the light, the cushions and the drape of the dress almost exactly.
Gustav Klimt, "The Kiss"
Klimt's gold-leaf masterpiece of 1907–08 hangs in the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna and is perhaps the most reproduced image of the Vienna Secession. The remake moves the embracing couple onto a real lawn scattered with petals and replaces gold leaf with a yellow robe painted with blocks of black and colour. It is a reminder that Klimt's patterned cloak is, underneath the shimmer, a very simple shape.
Twentieth-century icons, from surrealism to pop
René Magritte, "The Lovers" — remake by Linda Cieniawska
Magritte painted "The Lovers" in 1928 in more than one version; one is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Two people kiss with their heads wrapped in cloth, a disquieting image of intimacy blocked by a barrier. Linda Cieniawska replaces the opaque fabric with sheer net, so the kiss becomes half visible, which subtly changes the painting's question about how well lovers can ever know each other.
Edward Hopper, "Nighthawks" — remake by Bastian Vice and Jiji Seabird
Hopper's 1942 painting of a late-night diner, owned by the Art Institute of Chicago, has become shorthand for urban loneliness. The remake finds a real corner café with a curved glass front and photographs it after dark, with a few figures at the counter. It shows how much of Hopper's mood comes from composition and light: the bright interior and the empty street outside.
Frida Kahlo, "The Frame"
Kahlo's 1938 self-portrait, painted on aluminium and set inside a decorated glass frame, was bought by the French state in 1939 and is now at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The remake keeps the flowers in the hair, the joined eyebrows and the steady gaze, and places the sitter against a red patterned wall with folk embroidery on her blouse, echoing Kahlo's love of Mexican popular art.
Frida Kahlo, "Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird"
Painted in 1940 and now at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, this is one of Kahlo's best-known self-portraits: a thorn necklace with a dead hummingbird, a monkey and a black cat behind her shoulders, leaves all around. The remake uses a toy bird, a twig crown and a strong painted brow to rebuild the image, keeping its stillness while softening its darker symbols.
Roy Lichtenstein, "Ohhh...Alright..." — remake by Emily Kiel
Lichtenstein's 1964 painting, in a private collection, borrows the look of romance comics: a red-haired woman holding a phone, a speech bubble, and the dots of cheap commercial printing enlarged into a style. Emily Kiel's remake paints those dots directly onto skin and hand, an ingenious way of turning a painting about printed images back into a photograph of a real face.
A portrait half erased
The feature does not identify this pairing. One image shows a sitter pressing a hand against a smeared pane of glass; the other is a painted portrait in which a brushstroke-like smear crosses the woman's face in the same place. It shows the playful side of the project: a remake can also respond to the surface of a painting, not just its subject.
Why recreating a painting teaches you to see it
Recreating a famous painting forces choices the original artist already made. Which details make it recognisable? Often it is the pose and the angle of the head rather than the costume. The arrangement of figures can survive a total change of setting, as in "Nighthawks", while a single prop can carry the whole joke, as in the beer-can "Creation of Adam".
Museums have noticed the educational value. During the 2020 lockdowns, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles invited people to restage artworks with household objects, and thousands of results circulated online. The idea is the same one Booooooom tested years earlier: copying a picture with your own body is a fast way to notice light, gesture and composition.
Tips if you want to try your own remake
- Pick a simple composition. One or two figures with a clear pose, such as a portrait, is easier than a crowded scene.
- Study the light first. Note where it comes from and how hard the shadows are. A single lamp or window usually gets you closest.
- Match the pose before the props. Viewers recognise the gesture and the tilt of the head long before they notice whether a dress is accurate.
- Choose one clever substitution. The best remakes change one thing on purpose: a phone for a book, a beer for a divine spark.
- Credit the original. Name the artist, title and date when you share it, so others can find the painting that inspired you.
An old canon, a new audience
Projects like Remake are sometimes dismissed as internet fun, and they are fun. But each of these photos sends a viewer back to the painting behind it, often to a museum they might never have thought of visiting. A centuries-old canvas becomes a conversation again, with the original artist on one side and a person with a camera, a few props and a good eye on the other.
Sources: Chronicle Books: Remake: Master Works of Art Reimagined (Jeff Hamada, 2015); Booooooom; earlier coverage at Artfido. Remake photographs by the contributors named above; original paintings by the artists named.
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