Charles Dickens face swap

Where this one comes from

William Powell Frith painted this in 1859 for John Forster, who was Dickens’s closest friend and later his first biographer. Dickens was forty-seven and publishing A Tale of Two Cities that year. The canvas went to the Victoria and Albert Museum with the rest of Forster’s collection, and it is still there.

What is in the picture

He sits in a chair pushed back from a desk, one arm hooked over the chair back and the other hand hanging loose — the pose of a man interrupted rather than arranged. Behind him is the clutter of somebody who works: papers, a writing table, books stacked at the right edge, the room dim and green. The beard is at the length he kept in the late 1850s, a few years before he grew it out for the reading tours. His face is angled slightly away and his eyes are not.

When people use it

The picture for looking up from work you have not finished. It fits a message sent at eleven at night, or any moment whose point is that you were in the middle of something when this happened.

How your face lands in it

His head is smaller in the frame than most of this catalogue, because you are looking at a whole seated man in a whole room, so it rewards a photograph taken close up in decent light. The beard is the thing to plan for: it stays, and it is generous, so an entirely smooth-shaven picture comes back wearing one. A photograph shot at a slight angle lands nearest to his.

Charles Dickens in his Study — William Powell Frith, 1859. William Powell Frith died in 1909, so the painting is in the public domain in the United Kingdom, in the European Union and in the United States. Source

Also in: Paintings · Victorian portraits