Chopin face swap

Where this one comes from

Delacroix painted Chopin and George Sand together in 1838 — the composer at a piano, the writer listening behind him — and never finished it. After his death in 1863 somebody cut the canvas in two so that the halves could be sold separately. Chopin went to the Louvre and Sand to a museum outside Copenhagen, and the picture has never been reassembled except in photographs. Chopin was twenty-eight and had ten years to live.

What is in the picture

The head is thrown slightly back and turned, the eyes are unfocused, and the mouth is open a little; he is listening to something rather than looking at anything. The paint is thin and unfinished, with the ground showing through the coat and the background barely established. What remains is a face painted quickly by a close friend who thought he was working on something bigger, and the missing half is the reason it looks like a fragment.

When people use it

For being deep in something and unreachable. It suits anything about music, concentration, or being left alone to work.

How your face lands in it

A three-quarter head turned upward and away, in soft light with the dark hair loose around it. The upward tilt is unusual and it survives the swap, so the result looks lost in thought whatever expression you feed in. Because the original is so thinly painted, a very sharp photograph can look more finished than the picture around it.

Portrait of Frédéric Chopin — Eugène Delacroix, 1838. Eugène Delacroix died in 1863, so the painting has been in the public domain for well over a century and the museum photograph of it carries no separate rights. Source

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