The new President of Estonia, Ülle Madise, recently shared a photograph on social media of a meeting in the Office of the President. The two paintings in the room immediately caught our eye and we wanted to know what they were, but despite extensive Google searching, we couldn't find a reference to their names or artists. Gemini to the rescue! With a single prompt, Gemini tracked down the two paintings for us and even gave us links to their official museum catalog records. Incredibly, when Gemini couldn't identify the rightmost painting, it scoured the web until it found a different photograph from a different event with a better angle and used that to track down the painting's identity.
This is the prompt we used to identify the two paintings in the presidential photo:
identify the paintings in this photo and connect me to digitized copies online and the museum catalog entries for them
Left Painting: Juhan Nõmmik, Winter Landscape. Otepää (Talvemaastik. Otepää), 1942 The large painting on the left is Winter Landscape. Otepää by the Pallas-trained Estonian landscape artist Juhan Nõmmik (1902–1975). Painted in 1942 in oil on canvas (97.3 × 130 cm), the work captures a sweeping, tonal view of the snow-blanketed hills, farmsteads, and bare trees of the Otepää uplands in Southern Estonia. It belongs to the Painting Collection of the Art Museum of Estonia (inventory number EKM j 27673 M 5823). You can view the digitized copy and official museum records at the Art Museum of Estonia Digital Collection (EKM Digitaalkogu) and in the Estonian Museum Information System (MuIS).
Right Painting: Juhan Nõmmik, Saaremaa, 1929 Searching the web uncovered a different angle of the President's working study in this photograph from ERR, which provides a much clearer view of the smaller canvas hanging above the bookcase on the right. This closer view makes it possible to identify the painting as another work by Juhan Nõmmik (1902–1975), titled Saaremaa and painted in 1929. You can view the digitized copy and official museum catalog entry at the Art Museum of Estonia Digital Collection (EKM Digitaalkogu).
For reference, this is the alternate angle that Gemini tracked down:
