An Impressionist's World

Leo Isikdogan

October 3, 2021

It feels natural to associate certain periods in the past with the type of media used to depict the world at that time. In the 1960s, for instance, television was the dominant medium, and we associate that decade with the black-and-white images of the small screen. In the 1800s, however, the majority of imagery was created using paint and canvas. The world neither looked black and white in the early 1900s, nor like impressionist paintings in the late 1800s. But what if it did? What would the world have looked like during the Impressionist era? 'An Impressionist's World' imagines the world as perceived by an impressionist. It was created using a neural network trained primarily on impressionist paintings by Claude Monet, as well as works by other prominent impressionist and post-impressionist artists, including Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh.