In the small hours of Monday, Donald Trump posted an image of a very strange painting, captioned "Great painting!!" and without the artist's name

The canvas heaps together George Washington, the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima, an astronaut on the Moon, the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore and Trump himself, along with a woman sewing a flag by candlelight, a boy with an elderly man in period dress, and a humanoid robot gazing at fireworks.

The author turned up through a search: it is a print by the artist Ray Simon of Youngstown, Ohio, who calls himself "the artist who painted America". The work is called Forged in Freedom and is dedicated to the 250th anniversary of the United States. Simon is selling 250 prints at 250 dollars each.

The robot in the composition is made by Elon Musk's company, and by the artist's own description it is "a bridge between the legacy of the founders and the possibilities of tomorrow". Simon reports that somewhere in the painting Martin Luther King walks arm in arm with Lincoln, and that a Bible lies on the table where the Declaration of Independence is being signed.

The painting looks like the sort of neural-network generation that grannies send each other on WhatsApp.