Those are freakin’ amazing!
But it of course is not true that anybody can do that, I do get the comment. In this case there are more to the paintings than technical expertise (agreed the imperfections are perfect), but perhaps art is not art if it doesn’t leave some of the work of completing the process to occur within the mind of the viewer? Technical skill alone is not art …it is a craft. Just like something pretty and just pretty is not art but decoration. IMveryHO.
It was a difference of opinion in the artistic community of the time, with near-realism coming to an end and the rise of impressionism. The thinking was that he was lame for painting what he saw and “real” artists paint impressions.
I think I’m in agreement with you, though. I’d rather come up with my own impressions in general. Also, while Bougeureau was technically near-perfect, I think he also had quite a lot of passion and “soul” in his work. The fact that he painted every subject so lovingly, portraying even the lowest peasant as clean and pretty, speaks to me. In other words, he could not only paint every stitch of lace on a lady’s bodice, but he was able to bring her personality through her eyes out to the viewer. One of my favorites of his for deep passion is his take on the Abduction of Psyche. The look on Psyche’s face in that piece almost turns me on, like soft porn. 
I take your point, but I guess I don’t see how this makes a painting of a photograph different from a painting of the object itself.
I covered some of that upstream. A camera has a single plane of sharpest focus, while a human eye creates an image in the brain by merging many glances – the glances focus at different depths and the “aperture” of the eye is constantly adjusting to extract useful visual info.
Additionally, the M&M bag looks photographic because of the lighting and the background. The burnt out highlights, soft shadow beneath the bag, and featureless background are all standard advertising photography motifs. You put a big light source (usually a softbox) near your subject and some kind of smooth, single-color background behind it. It would be tough to duplicate that set-up without electric lights or flashes. (But it could be done.)
So, If someone think the M&M painting looks more realistic than any pre-photography painting, I thinks that means the person just automatically thinks that the more a painting looks like a photo, the more “realistic” it looks. Which ain’t necessarily so.
Thank you **Baal **for articulating it.
Viewing an object in real life is a process not an instant. A photograph (or a photorealistic painting) of an object does not necessarily do a good job a fooling the eyes and mind that engaged in that process that the object is really there. A painting of an object that succeeds in fooling the yes is able to let the eyes and the mind go through that dynamic process and conclude “object.”
Put simply being able to say that something cannot be easily told apart from a photograph is very different than saying that something cannot be easily told apart from an actual object. The latter is, it would seem to me, much more difficult: it is not just painting what is there but being aware of how the eyes and mind perceive and painting accordingly.
Wow. Aside from traditional techniques or newer techniques, that artist is really good. That drawing looked like a photograph.
Well, yes, he did very well what he set out to do. He obviously has a great deal of technical skill. But that’s not the same thing as artistic skill.
To reinforce what others have said: It depends on what you mean by “modern era,” but yes, before the rise of color film, there were painters who used optical technologies, like the camera obscura, to be able to make what amount to painted photographs.
As for never seeing them, that’s a deficiency in your art education. I have certainly seen them. Some of Vermeer’s work is near-photographic.
I don’t generally think of Bouguereau or the Pre-Raphaelites as being quite photographic, but their understanding of optics was generally sound. And of course Leonardo did amazing things with color texture that get pretty close to photographic at times.
As for artists before the Renaissance, maybe it existed at one time and was lost?
It’s just possible that someone was doing camera obscura work in ancient times, and all the work faded and was lost long ago. Or maybe not. Maybe that is just a relatively recent invention.
But certainly there were amazing sculptures in ancient Greece and Rome. There may well have been amazing painters as well, whose work just hasn’t survived because of materials issues. Or some work have been attractive kindling to religious fanatics. Look up the Iconoclasts.