THE MASTER OF ROMANTICISM

New AI project explores mysteries of Delacroix

- FRANK ROSE

Barthélémy Jobert is so engrossed in the 19th century that he takes an expansive view of it.

For him it began intellectually in the 1760s and ran into the 1920s.

A leading art historian in Paris and former president of what is now Sorbonne University, he is particularly expert in the work of Eugène Delacroix, a French Romantic artist best known for his 1830 painting Liberty Leading The People, a stridently anti-royalist work depicting citizens rising up against a despot.

Now, Jobert will be getting a significant boost in his ability to use artificial intelligence and other 21st-century technologies in his yearslong quest to explore Delacroix's art and resolve mysteries about its attribution.

This week, Schmidt Sciences, a nonprofit founded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy Schmidt, plans to announce a new grantmaking programme that will underwrite Jobert's project, known as Digital Delacroix, with funding thought to be in the high six figures.

Jobert seeks to digitise and analyse many things Delacroix — his letters and journals, the murals he painted in the second half of his career, even contemporary newspaper accounts of the man and his work — and cross-reference them for scholarly purposes while putting them online for others to explore.

The grant from Schmidt will allow Jobert to obtain more computing power and augment his current team of six by hiring a couple of researchers trained in art history and AI — a rare breed, even in France.

For Schmidt Sciences, Digital Delacroix is the first of a projected 10 to 15 grant recipients that will receive US$10 million (340 million baht) to apply AI to research in the humanities. Outlays are expected to range from less than $100,000 to as much as $1.5 million per grant. (Schmidt Sciences would not provide an exact figure for its support of Digital Delacroix.)