George Washington face swap

Where this one comes from

Gilbert Stuart began this in Philadelphia in April 1796 and deliberately never finished it: while the original stayed in his studio he could go on painting copies from it, and he produced well over a hundred, calling them his hundred-dollar bills. The Boston Athenaeum bought it after his death, which is where the name comes from, and it is now shared between the National Portrait Gallery and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

What is in the picture

The head and collar are worked up to a high finish and everything around them is bare priming — you can see the weave of the cloth and the brown scrub where a body was going to go. Washington was sixty-four and wearing a new set of dentures that pushed his lower face out of shape, which is why the mouth looks clamped and the cheeks look padded. The engraving on the one-dollar note comes from this painting, reversed, so most people have looked at it thousands of times without once seeing it.

When people use it

For the flat assertion of value. It works over anything to do with being paid, being owed, or being worth it, and it works as a straight face in any argument about money.

How your face lands in it

The face is large, lit from the front and almost square to the viewer, with the white hair making a bright rim all the way around it — about as easy a target as this catalogue offers. The unfinished canvas behind means there is nothing for your face to align against except the collar. The white hair reads as a wig and does not change, so whatever colour yours is, you come out powdered.

George Washington (The Athenaeum Portrait) — Gilbert Stuart, 1796. Gilbert Stuart died in 1828 and the portrait dates from 1796, so it is in the public domain in the United States and throughout Europe with centuries to spare. Source

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