The Desperate Man face swap

Where this one comes from

Gustave Courbet painted himself like this between 1843 and 1845, in his mid-twenties, before he was famous and before he became the painter who insisted that art should only show what the eye can actually see. He kept the picture. It was still with him decades later, through exile in Switzerland, and it stayed in private hands afterwards rather than going to a museum.

What is in the picture

Both hands are in his hair, the elbows are wide, the eyes are enormous and fixed on you, and the whole head is shoved right up against the front of the canvas with no room left anywhere. Nothing else is in the picture. It is composed like a shout — the light slams into the face from the left, the background is a dark smear, and every diagonal in the arms points back at the eyes. A young painter working out that a portrait can be an event rather than a record.

When people use it

For the moment the scale of it lands. It is the single most useful picture here for a deadline, a bill or an email that begins with the word unfortunately, and it needs no caption at all.

How your face lands in it

The face is enormous in the frame, brightly and directly lit, with hands and hair closing it at the top: about the easiest target on the site in purely technical terms, and the most transformative in effect. The expression belongs to the original and is nearly all in the eyes and eyebrows, so your own face arrives into a very loud picture. A neutral photograph works fine; the painting supplies the panic.

Le Desespere (The Desperate Man) — Gustave Courbet, c. 1843. Gustave Courbet died in 1877, so the painting is in the public domain in the European Union, the United Kingdom and the United States by a wide margin. Source

Also in: Paintings · Self-portraits