Cezanne face swap

Where this one comes from

Cezanne painted himself in a workman’s cap around 1872, when he was in his thirties, living outside Paris and being rejected by the official Salon with great regularity. He made something like twenty-six self-portraits over his life. This one is in the Hermitage in St Petersburg, and it belongs to the years just before the first impressionist exhibition, where he showed and was mocked.

What is in the picture

A blunt, heavy head built out of visible slabs of paint, with a beard that is more or less a dark mass and eyes set deep under the brim of a plain cloth cap. He painted himself as a labourer rather than an artist, on purpose, at a time when Paris expected painters to look like gentlemen. The background is a few broad strokes of blue-green that refuse to become a room. Everything here is about weight and construction and nothing at all is about charm.

When people use it

For declining to be charmed. It is the reply to enthusiasm you do not share, and it works particularly well against anything trying too hard to be liked.

How your face lands in it

A large, near-frontal head with the cap brim cutting a straight dark line across the forehead, lit flatly. Technically simple, with one catch worth knowing: the beard is substantial and it stays, and so does the way the whole head is built out of visible brushstrokes, so the finished face is noticeably rougher in surface than in the smoother old-master templates.

Self-Portrait in a Casquette — Paul Cezanne, c. 1872. Paul Cezanne died in 1906, placing the work in the public domain across the European Union and the United Kingdom, and a painting of about 1872 is public domain in the United States as well. Source

Also in: Paintings · Self-portraits