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.

Encyclopédie 2026: Diderot's plates of the trades, drawn again for the jobs we do now.

Between 1762 and 1772 Diderot and d'Alembert published eleven volumes of engraved plates showing every trade of their day: the workshop scene above, the tools laid out below, each one numbered Fig. 1, Fig. 2. I took eight of those plates from The Met's Open Access collection, where they are in the public domain, cropped them to the bare engraving and built a Recraft V4 Style from them. Encyclopédie 2026 uses the same layout to document the trades we actually do now: the bike courier with his insulated backpack, the phone repairman, the kitchen-table remote worker, the content creator and her ring light, the barista, the data centre technician, the gamer and the e-scooter charger. Three plates come to life with Recraft's video tools, and the frontispiece puts a smartphone where the Enlightenment put the sun. Same encyclopedia, two hundred and sixty years later; the tools changed, the workshop did not.

Very nice