#digitalyarbs

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Just had to do this one:

John Quincy Adams: The Insufferable Husband | The Rouge Incident

This short documentary uses the age-regressed life mask of John Quincy Adams to recreate a fascinating and awkward moment from his early marriage to Louisa Adams.

This is my first attempt at building a more coherent historical story script through AI filmmaking. It is far more challenging than most people realize, especially for someone who is not a videographer, but I gave it my best effort.

John Quincy and Louisa are still newlyweds when Adams is assigned as a diplomat to Prussia. The young King Frederick William III takes a liking to John Quincy, while Queen Louise finds Louisa charming and delightful. However, things take an uncomfortable turn when the Queen gifts Louisa a fashionable cosmetic rouge — something John Quincy strongly disapproved of.

The result was what I jokingly call: “The Rouge Incident.”

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John Quincy Adams - “Interfering in those particulars”....Now let me tell you about this.

This image presents John Quincy Adams through an age-regressed version of his life mask, paired with the hairstyle seen in his 1796 portrait by John Singleton Copley. Since the life mask is widely accepted as an accurate representation of Adams’s facial structure, it offers a solid foundation for visualizing him at a younger age. When the features are adjusted, accounting for fuller lips, thicker brows, and the natural softening that comes with youth, the result aligns remarkably well with Copley’s portrait of Adams at 28. It suggests that Copley’s painting was not only skillful, but strikingly faithful to Adams’s true appearance.

The inset images compare Copley’s painted portrait with the original life mask of Adams at age 58, cast by John Henri Isaac Browere. Unlike many portrait artists of the era, who often relied heavily on artistic license or lacked precision, Copley appears to have captured Adams’s underlying facial structure with notable accuracy.

Copley’s portrait depicts Adams during his service as Minister to the Netherlands, a period when he met his future wife, Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams. Their relationship offers a glimpse into Adams’s famously rigid personality and his sensitivity to “interference.”

On one occasion, Adams joined Louisa for a walk, “handsomely dressed in blue,” complete with a fashionable hat. When she complimented his appearance, he bristled and insisted that she must never take the liberty of interfering in such particulars.

The standard, however, did not apply equally.

A few years later in Berlin, Louisa found herself at odds with her husband over something as simple as rouge. After being gifted a cosmetic box by the Queen of Prussia who noticed Louisa’s pallor before a royal dance Louisa hesitated, knowing Adams would disapprove. Still, she kept the gift.

During Carnival season, when fashion called for dramatic black attire that could leave a pale face looking almost ghostly, Louisa decided to use the rouge. As she hurried past her husband on the way to a ball, he sensed something was amiss. Stopping her, he discovered the blush on her cheeks, sat her down, and promptly wiped it away. On another occasion, when she refused to remove it, he simply left her behind and attended the event alone.

Despite such rigid tendencies, it’s hard not to see Adams differently when looking at him through this age regressed life mask and Copley’s portrait. There’s a youthful confidence and, frankly, a striking appearance that stands out. If given the chance to meet him at 28, one might be tempted to say as much...though he would likely respond, with characteristic firmness, that such compliments were best left unspoken lest they interfere in those particulars.

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1825 Life Mask of John Quincy Adams brought to life.

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You are looking at the actual face of John Quincy Adams in 1825, when he was President of the United States.

This is Adams’s life mask, a cast of his head and upper torso made by John Henri Isaac Browere in 1825. The only other true likenesses we have of Adams are his daguerreotype photographs taken late in life. Unlike those later images, this mask shows Adams without his signature mutton chops during his presidency.

This image is a revisit of an earlier Photoshop reconstruction I created in 2020 using lower-quality base images. Since then, I have been able to photograph a higher-resolution, close-up view of the life mask, allowing me to capture far more detail in Adams’s face.

Browere’s casting process used a proprietary plaster mixture that, due to its lightweight nature, did not distort the subject’s facial features as the heavier plaster commonly used by his contemporaries often did. By all accounts, this resulted in an extremely accurate likeness. Because the plaster was so light, it was able to capture even the fine details of Adams’s skin.

Adams mentions Browere in his diary on August 30:

“Browere is a sculptor who has made at New York a bust of General Lafayette, and proposes to take busts of all the presidents.”

Adams was unable to sit for Browere in August because he returned home to Massachusetts for a time. In October, after returning to Washington, he sat for the artist. Adams recorded two brief entries:

“At Browere’s. He took my bust.” (October 29)

“Browere. The bust finished.” (November 5)

The mask itself was taken on the first date, and the finished bust was ready for display about a week later.

Browere has given us a rare image of John Quincy Adams smiling. When Horatio Greenough modeled a bust of Adams a few years later, he wrote:

“I shall not attempt to make him look cheerful. He does not and cannot. Gravity is natural to him, and a smile looks ill at home.”

But Adams’s smiling visage in Browere’s work is surely due to the sitter, not the artist.

—Source: David Meschutt, A Bold Experiment: John Henri Isaac Browere’s Life Masks of Prominent Americans

We know Browere’s life masks are accurate from historical testimony. James Madison wrote of his own life mask:

“Per request of Mr. Browere, busts of myself and of my wife, regarded as exact likenesses, have been executed by him in plaister, being casts made from the moulds formed on our persons, of which this certificate is given under my hand at Montpelier, 19 October, 1825.”

Browere’s mask of Lafayette is also considered an exact likeness. Samuel F. B. Morse wrote:

“Being requested by Mr. Browere to give my opinion of his bust or cast from the person of General La Fayette, I feel no hesitation in saying it appears to me to be a perfect facsimile of the General’s face.”

The Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York, is home to most of Browere’s life mask busts. John Quincy Adams’s bust is not currently on public display and remains in storage.

Special thanks to Fenimore Art Museum for allowing me photographic access to the Browere life mask collection.

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Andrew Jackson, Old Hickory in Full Dress Uniform. Actual likeness based off his daguerreotype photograph.

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On this day, March 16, 1751, James Madison was born. But can we really know what “Little Jimmy” actually looked like?

Paintings and drawings of Madison vary widely, sometimes leaving us to wonder whether the official portraits are even of the same man. Fortunately, there is a far more reliable source for his true likeness. Madison sat for a life mask—covering his head and upper torso—created by John Henri Isaac Browere.

Using this life mask, it is possible to reconstruct Madison’s true appearance. The initial reconstruction was created in Photoshop using the life mask itself—with no AI involved. The age-regressed images also use the same life mask as the base, showing Madison at younger ages; those versions incorporate both Photoshop and AI to visualize how he may have appeared earlier in life.

We know the mask represents Madison’s actual likeness because he confirmed it himself. In a statement written at his home, Montpelier, he certified its accuracy:

“Per request of Mr. Browere, busts of myself and of my wife, regarded as exact likenesses, have been executed by him in plaister, being casts made from the moulds formed on our persons, of which this certificate is given under my hand at Montpelier, 19 October, 1825.”

Through Browere’s life mask—and modern reconstruction—we can come closer than ever to seeing the real face of James Madison.

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Daniel Webster, age-regressed with different facial angles to show how he may have appeared around 1831. My goal is to create the most accurate likenesses possible of historical figures for my films. You don’t want to see actors who sort of resemble them—you want to feel like you’re seeing the historical figures themselves. Webster will be one of the featured characters in my John Quincy Adams (JQA) movie. Trailer Link: https://youtu.be/G9oCmAM3zXM

Daniel Webster (1782–1852) was a renowned American lawyer and statesman who represented New Hampshire and Massachusetts in the U.S. Congress and served as the 14th and 19th U.S. Secretary of State under Presidents William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, and Millard Fillmore. One of the most prominent attorneys of the 19th century, Webster argued more than 200 cases before the United States Supreme Court.

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William Braine (1814-1846)

William Braine was a British explorer. He served as a marine in the Royal Marines. From 1845 he was part of an expedition to find the Northwest Passage, but he died early in the trip and was buried on Beechey Island. His preserved body was exhumed in 1984, to try to determine the cause of death.

Braine was born in Oakhill, Somerset in 1814, and enlisted in the Royal Marines during the 1830s. He was assigned to HMS Erebus during Franklin's Lost Expedition.

The trip was expected to last about three years, so the ships were packed with provisions which included more than 136,000 pounds of flour, 3,684 gallons of high-proof alcohol and 33,000 pounds of tinned meat, soup and vegetables.

Braine died ten months into the expedition, and was buried with John Torrington and John Hartnell. He died last, and his corpse was in the worst condition, having been gnawed by rats before burial. Modern postmortem examinations suggested symptoms of tuberculosis and lead poisoning. However, other studies suggest tuberculosis was unlikely to have contributed to his death.

This image is a Photoshop and AI realistic reconstruction. The reconstruction is derived from Kristina Gehrmann’s original painting of William Braine, which itself was based on photographs of Braine’s preserved mummified remains after their exhumation in 1984.