I grew up in the ‘80s/’90s in a small ranch in a suburb of Boston with several nicely framed high-end reproductions of paintings from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in my living room. Sure they were just replicas, but I loved them as they were a great way to bring some of the magic of my favorite museum into our home where we could live with them in the context of our everyday lives. They even had a texture to them to suggest brush strokes. But let’s face it - it was clearly not the same as seeing the actual paintings in the museum.

Fast forward 30 years and just down the street from the Boston MFA in Cambridge, a group researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) has just released a paper on a new approach for replicating paintings that they claim is 4x more accurate than existing models at recreating exact color shades.