Oil portrait face swap

This is not a paint filter

Worth saying plainly, because the phrase that brings most people to this page suggests something else. Nothing on this site turns a photograph into a painting by laying brushstrokes over the top of it. It takes a painting that already exists, with its own light and its own hand, and rebuilds your features inside that.

The practical difference is that you do not choose the pose, the clothes or the expression — a painter settled those a century or two ago and is not available for notes. What you get in exchange is an image that survives being looked at closely, because the brushwork under it is a real one rather than a texture applied afterwards.

What a commissioned portrait was for

Not all of these were ordered by the person in them — Romney painted Emma Hart because he could not stop, and Manet painted Berthe Morisot because they were in each other's lives — but all of them are built to the same specification, and that specification had a price list.

It was the most expensive object a prosperous family bought that was not a building. A banker's wife in Paris, an industrialist's daughter on an estate outside Moscow, a titled woman standing in a Paris studio: each is wearing the household's entire case for itself, and the painter has been engaged to put that case gracefully.

The good ones made something out of knowing it. Ingres spent twelve years on the larger of the two he has here, and bent the geometry of a mirror to get the shape he wanted. Serov kept an eleven-year-old at a table for two months to catch a light that lasts a second. Kramskoi painted a woman he refused to name and let St Petersburg be scandalised by her coat.

Which to pick

By light. The Serov is lit from every direction at once, by daylight coming off a table in a bright room, which makes it the most forgiving picture here for an ordinary overcast photograph. The Ingres portraits are smooth, shadowless and finished until no brush mark survives on the skin, so a hard flash picture will sit slightly on top of them instead of inside.

By attitude, since attitude survives the swap. The Kramskoi looks down at you from a carriage. The Boldini has just swept into the room and is aware of it. The Ingres girl in swan's down gives away nothing whatever. Pick the posture you would like to borrow; the face is going to be yours either way.