Trades of the 21st Century: a lost Company School album of modern work.

In the Wellcome Collection I found a run of anonymous 1800s watercolours of Delhi trades. A carpenter, a jeweller, a rice seller: each squats on bare cream paper with the tools of the trade laid out around him. These "Company School" albums were painted to catalogue a city's working life, so I trained a Recraft V4 Style on nine of them and asked it to paint the trades their painter could never have imagined. The result is ten new plates: the delivery rider checking his phone beside an e-scooter, the phone repairer with his loupe, the creator in front of her ring light, the earbud seller weighing earbuds on a brass scale. Same pose, same patience, new tools.

I found Eugène Grasset’s 1896 La plante et ses applications ornementales, a pattern book of Art Nouveau plant studies, on the Public Domain Image Archive, sourced from the Smithsonian Libraries via the Internet Archive. I used four of its plates as references to build a custom Recraft V4 Style called “Flora Urbana – Grasset Ornament”. The series, Flora Urbana: A Botanical Atlas of Modern Life, treats everyday technology as newly discovered species, each plate with a specimen above and abstracted ornament borders below. Earbuds become flower buds, a drone becomes a winged seed, a video call becomes a bed of blossoms, and an electric kettle becomes a snail. Grasset’s flat, lithographed look makes the modern objects feel like they belong in a Victorian herbarium.