Dostoevsky face swap

Where this one comes from

Vasily Perov painted this in 1872 on a commission from Pavel Tretyakov, who was assembling portraits of the men he thought Russia should remember. Dostoevsky had been back from Siberian penal exile for a decade and had just published Demons. His widow wrote later that Perov had spent a week visiting before he started, waiting for the expression he wanted, and that what he caught was the look the family called being inside himself. It is in the Tretyakov Gallery.

What is in the picture

He sits three-quarters on against a nearly black ground, in a grey-brown jacket, with the fingers of both hands locked over one knee. The pose is the thing: it is how he sat, and it is a posture people who had been in prison were said to hold. The light is low and comes from one side, the beard is thin and reddish, and the eyes are focused a couple of feet in front of him at nothing. There is no book, no pen and no furniture to speak of.

When people use it

For thinking about something nobody else in the room is thinking about. It suits the reply written three hours late, and anything about being somewhere else while present.

How your face lands in it

A three-quarter head in dim side light against a very dark ground, with a substantial beard closing the lower half. The darkness swallows the edges, so the result is moodier than almost any photograph you can feed it. The beard and the high receding hairline both stay, and they carry most of the recognition.

Portrait of Fyodor Dostoyevsky — Vasily Perov, 1872. Vasily Perov died in 1882, so the painting has been in the public domain for well over a century and the Google Art Project reproduction is published on that basis. Source

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