as a followup to this work, its worthwhile to look at the Image Analogies work done by Aaron Hertzman (Siggraph 2001). He takes the texture synthesis idea and carries it over to image synthesis by constructing analogies between sets of images. He is able to do

1. Texture synthesis
2. Texture Transfer
3. Painter style rendering

and what I find most intersting, texture by numbers
here is an example :

http://www.mrl.nyu.edu/projects/image-analogies/oxbow.html