Carel Fabritius face swap

Where this one comes from

Carel Fabritius painted this in 1654. On the twelfth of October that year the gunpowder magazine in Delft blew up, taking a quarter of the town, his studio and Fabritius himself; he was thirty-two. Fewer than fifteen of his paintings are known to survive, one of which is The Goldfinch, finished the same year. This self-portrait is in the National Gallery in London.

What is in the picture

He wears a fur-trimmed coat and an open shirt and his hair is doing whatever it likes, and he looks slightly up and out with an expression that has been variously read as sceptical, melancholy and about to speak. What is unusual is the background: it is pale and cloudy rather than the standard black, so the head is dark against light instead of light against dark. He had inverted his teacher’s lighting, which is a small technical choice and the main reason the picture feels modern.

When people use it

For the unguarded moment. It is the face for a message you would not have sent if you had waited an hour, and it works anywhere the point is that no performance is being attempted.

How your face lands in it

The dark head against a pale ground is the inverse of most templates here, so what you get is closer to a photograph taken against a bright wall than to a candlelit portrait. The face is large, three-quarters on and evenly lit. The hair is thick and untidy and stays that way, which tends to make the finished image look more informal than whatever you put in.

Self-Portrait — Carel Fabritius, 1654. Carel Fabritius died in 1654, so the painting entered the public domain centuries ago and the National Gallery reproduction is published on that basis. Source

Also in: Paintings · Self-portraits · Baroque · Dutch Golden Age