“He has such a passion for painting. It’s amazing. He’s going to go down in the history books as a great artist.”

— Bonnie Flood, a Cumming, Ga., art instructor who spent a month teaching George W. Bush how to paint. Flood told Atlanta’s Fox 5 that she worked for six hours a day with the former president and one of his sisters-in-law, and that while his original focus was canine art (“I think he said he’s painted 50 dogs”), she convinced him to give landscape painting a try. “He picked it up so quick. It just was amazing, really. His whole heart is in it.” He signs his paintings “43.”

Bush’s new hobby came to light last month after the death of longtime family dog Barney, when the Bush family released a painting the former president made of the terrier; more of his work came out after a hacker circulated images he’d found in Bush family email accounts. Our critic colleague Philip Kennicott assessed the work and found “the president grappling with strong perspectival challenges” and doing not a bad job at all, really.