Frederick the Great face swap

Where this one comes from

Anton Graff painted Frederick II of Prussia in the early 1780s, when the king was approaching seventy and had spent forty years at war or preparing for it. Frederick loathed sitting for portraits and gave almost nobody the time, so Graff worked largely from observation and earlier studies. The result is unusually unflattering for a royal image, and it is the one most reproduced ever since.

What is in the picture

A blue coat gone dull at the shoulders, a plain white stock, and the eight-pointed star of the Black Eagle as the only ornament in the picture. The eyes are pale and slightly protruding and the mouth has collapsed inward the way a mouth does when the teeth have gone. He wrote French verse, played the flute every evening, corresponded with Voltaire until they fell out, and invaded Silesia in his first year on the throne; the face in this portrait is what the combination left behind.

When people use it

For the veteran of a long and pointless campaign. It fits any thread that has been running for years, and it is the face for a person who has seen this particular argument before and knows how it ends.

How your face lands in it

A large three-quarter head, lit flatly, with the white wig making a hard bright edge on both sides of it and the collar closing it underneath. Technically easy. The wig is the whole signal here and it does not move, so whatever your own hair is doing, the finished picture is a person in a powdered military wig with a very tired expression.

Frederick the Great — Anton Graff, c. 1781. Anton Graff died in 1813, so the painting has been in the public domain across Europe and the United States for well over a century. Source

Also in: Paintings · Royal portraits