Girl with a Red Hat face swap

Where this one comes from

Vermeer painted this around 1665, on wood rather than canvas, which he almost never did. It is tiny — roughly twenty-three centimetres by eighteen — and x-rays show there is another painting underneath it, a man’s portrait lying the other way up, which Vermeer simply turned round and worked over. It is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

What is in the picture

Most of the surface is hat. A vast soft red brim throws the top half of the face into shade and glows around the edge where the light gets through it, and beneath it there is a blue robe, a bright slip of white at the throat, and two lion-head finials on a chair back turned towards you. The highlights on the lips and the eyes are little round beads of pure paint, put on wet, and they are the reason the face looks as if it is about to move.

When people use it

For the sideways glance over a shoulder. It suits any exchange where you have turned round because somebody said your name, and it carries a good deal of warmth for a picture with almost nothing in it.

How your face lands in it

The brim casts a real shadow across the forehead and brow, so the result keeps more shade on the upper face than most templates — which is flattering and slightly mysterious rather than a problem. The face is turned over the shoulder towards you, so a photograph taken with your head slightly turned sits better here than a straight-on one. The hat, unsurprisingly, stays.

Girl with a Red Hat — Johannes Vermeer, c. 1665. Johannes Vermeer died in 1675, so the painting has long been in the public domain, and a straight photograph of a flat work of that age acquires no new rights. Source

Also in: Paintings · Baroque · Dutch Golden Age